Three magic weapons of Betaworks: construction, acquisition and investment

Betaworks's office environment is quite artistic. Lead: American Science and Technology blog The Verge wrote today that, with the lucrative return on investment, the start-up plant in New York, in the United States, Betaworks began to enter a new stage of development. The company's unique strategy can be summed up to three words: construction, acquisition, investment. The following is the full article: Betaworks was founded in 2007, headquartered in New York, they seem to be in good shape recently: after the acquisition of Digg last year, to help the ailing social news service revitalized; their Dots game is among the top of the iOS rankings. Because of the early stakes in the Tumblr, they were also profitable when the light blogging platform was bought by Yahoo for $1.1 billion trillion. The company's unique strategy boils down to three words: construction, acquisitions, investment. It's not easy to put a label on Betaworks. Some say they are creative laboratories, some say digital studios, and some call it "building companies." In fact, they have come out of their own unique path, unlike the entrepreneurial incubator such as Y Combinator, or the traditional venture capital fund. Whatever it is, their quick, agile, and fearless models seem to fit into today's science and technology environment. Building on the "Hacker in Thrive" project they have just completed, 8 senior programmers have come to the company for 4 months. In the first few weeks, they came up with hundreds of ideas and then selected more than 10. They made prototypes and experimented with them, and the outlook was eventually cut off, and teams were formed for potential projects, such as the GIF search engine giphy. Eventually, five startups were born: a game, a search, a weather service, a music collaboration tool, and a video delivery app. One of the hackers named Alex Chung, who had participated in the project Y Combinator, said: "The incubator is the old model." You put a great effort into an idea, and then you put all your energy into recruiting and financing, but you don't know if it's going to work. "But in Betaworks, he has a lot of freedom, he can start all kinds of experiments, and then give up the idea before." And when an idea is approved by the user, you can quickly build a team. "The mobile app industry is much like the record industry, and it all depends on the main work." "he said. In other words, they have adopted a strategy of "wide net and fine selection". New products are valued more than aspiring ceo,betaworks. "We attract people who have the ability to start their own company but don't want to run the company," they said in a pointed statement. They prefer to be co-founder of 8 products at the same time, rather than being the sole founder of a company for a long time. "Each Hacker in Thrive is now a miniatureCompany, as an independent entity of the integration, equity is Betaworks and the founder of the company to share. "Our main focus is on building, which is what distinguishes us," he said. If a project fails after 6 months, we are not worried about it and will simply stop the project and continue to develop. "Murphy Paul Murphy, senior vice president of Betaworks, said. But critics say it is an evasion of responsibility. "Which of the great startups has not been criticized?" Never experienced failure? "If you don't put pressure on the founders, you'll never be a great company," said one prominent tech investor. "So far, Betaworks has enough money to keep trying," he said. They were early investors and operating partners for Summize and TweetDeck, and the two companies have been bought by Twitter. The two acquisitions helped the company make a profit of about 50 million dollars, according to people familiar with the matter. Investments in Tumblr, Groupon and Omgpop also received rewards: Tumblr was bought by Yahoo, Groupon was listed and Omgpop was bought by Zynga for $200 million. It was the investment that made the company's early backers handsomely rewarded, and even the company itself was making a profit. They are still doing a lot of seed investment and have completed 11 deals this year. However, it is precisely because of the great success of the investment business that the company has entered a critical moment. Over the years, Betaworks's two co-founder John Posvik John Borthwock and Andrew Wiesman Andrew Weissman have been sitting in the bright, airy offices. They are seen as both sides of the company, Posvik more focused on operations and products, while Weisman more on investment, but they also absorb energy and wisdom from each other. But in the fall of 2011, it was a disagreement about the future of Betaworks. Weisman hopes to set up a separate traditional venture capital fund to expand the company's investment arm to allow more deals and investments. The controversy led to the rupture of two founders. Weisman finally left, joined the venture capital company Ventures Investment (Union Square), Betaworks is responsible for Posvik. As a result, Posvik doubled their initial mission: Continue to build the company. "This really opens up a new chapter. Posvik explained. Chartbeat, bitly, SocialFlow, the first generation of companies are enterprise software companies, by providing services to other enterprises to make money. Now, Betaworks has changed direction, the second generation of companies mainly for consumer users, and more and more emphasis on the mobile industry. For now, Betaworks's biggest riddle is the new Digg, which bought the public in July 2012Secretary。 Once a pioneer in social journalism, the service has become one of the major sources of traffic for major websites. But Digg is no longer the scene, users are also a lot of loss, only the cost of hosting up to 200,000 dollars a month. The Betaworks team put the original Digg site on one side, began to reinvent the company, and compressed the cost to $20,000 a month. The number of users on Digg appears to be a U-turn, and once again becomes an important source of traffic for major websites. With initial success, the Digg team has taken on a more daunting task: developing a product that replaces Google Reader in just 3 months. Collaboration makes the plan possible. Young companies can use betaworks to accumulate massive amounts of real-time data and even share engineering and design talent. "It takes a lot of effort to start building from scratch," he said. "For example, develop a process that allows users to register, log in, and associate with Twitter and Facebook," says Nier Wihler, Betaworks user experience Director. We've done these things before, so we've got a template to draw on. "To help Betaworks foster a new generation of companies, Posvik recruited a lot of talent. Sham Mandel (Sam Mandel) moved from TweetDeck to take charge of corporate development, and Andrew Mclafflin (Andrew MacLaughlin), who served at Google and the White House, became the new CEO of Digg, Gillard Lothain (Gilad Lotan) Leaving SocialFlow as Betaworks chief scientist, Nicolas Chers (Nicholas chirls) focused on Betaworks's seed investments. "I have formed the Dream team. "Posvik said. The main focus on building enterprises, rather than investing, is bound to face great risks. So far, Betaworks has yet to set up a company sufficient to fund its operations and development. But they are trying to make progress. "There is always a contradiction between the company's mission and its profits. "A lot of outsiders would say, ' Don't lie to yourself, how can you live without money, ' said David Shen, a Betaworks consultant from the early stages of development, David Shen. ' But we don't get up every day to make money, we're entrepreneurs who want to do something new. "But early indications are that young companies betaworks nurturing are experimenting with a variety of business models. For example, the iOS game "Dots" allows users to spend money to upgrade combat effectiveness. Digg is also starting to advertise on the home page and is planning to charge for a premium version of the RSS reader. Storytelling Application Tapestry recently worked with big brands such as Dove and General Electric. Betaworks recently bought Instapaper, who already had theProfitable business model, and Betaworks with the expanding media ecosystem. Betaworks's first generation of companies will eventually be financed externally and independently, but their current goal is to keep existing projects in-house for a long time. Posvik called it "a new phase of Betaworks's long-term evolution": from a start-up factory that relied on the main project, to the state of our dreams: a data-driven media company that not only creates value but also improves value over time. (Si yuan)