acquisition

Bending Spoons acquires Evernote, marking the end of an era • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 16, 2022Posted in acquisition, App, Apps, Enterprise, Evernote, note taking, StartupsNo Comments

Evernote, the note-taking and task management app founded over 20 years ago, has been acquired by Milan-based app developer Bending Spoons. In a post on Evernote’s newsroom, Evernote CEO Ian Small said that Bending Spoons will take ownership of Evernote in a transaction expected to close in early 2023. “For Evernote, this decision is the next strategic step forward on our journey to be an extension of your brain,” Small wrote. “Teaming up with Bending Spoons will [accelerate] the delivery of improvements across our teams, professional, personal and free offerings.” For Evernote, the acquisition — the terms of which weren’t made public — marks the end of a roller coaster of a journey. Founded in 2000 by Russian-American entrepreneur Stepan Pachikov, Redwood City-based Evernote made handwriting recognition software for Windows and the eponymous note-taking, web-clipping app Evernote, which stored notes on an “infinite roll of paper.” Under CEO Phil Libin, who joined the company in 2007, Evernote shifted its focus to the web, smartphones and Mac, starting with Evernote 3.0 in 2008. This proved to be a winning strategy — at least at first. Between 2010 and 2015, Evernote raised hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital from investors including Sequoia, Meritech Capital and Japanese media company Nikkei. Its web service reached 11 million users within the first three years and Evernote launched a business in China, Yinxiang Biji, as the startup sought to rapidly expand. In 2013, Evernote was reportedly valued at nearly a billion dollars. But then trouble set in. Evernote’s chief operating officer, appointed in June 2015, left after just a few months. Meanwhile, Libin pursued partnerships with physical goods brands like Moleskine and Pfeiffer, launching Evernote-branded desk accessory lines that failed to catch on in a major way. Former Google Glass executive Chris O’Neill replaced Libin in July 2015. And in October of that year, Evernote laid off 18% of its staff and closed three of its ten global offices. August 2018 saw an exodus of top execs, including Evernote’s chief technical officer, chief financial officer, chief product officer and head of HR. Fifteen percent of the company’s workforce was laid off in September 2018, a step O’Neill justified as necessary to correct for the company’s recent overexpansion and “inefficiency.” Small, the former CEO of platform-as-a-service company TokBox, came on in 2018. Under his leadership, Evernote hit $100 million in recurring revenue, millions of paying customers and over 250 million users. But it largely failed to keep pace with competitors like Notion, opting to rely heavily on a consumer-focused freemium model while eschewing the kinds of collaboration features embraced by its rivals. So what does Bending Spoons gain with the purchase? Another feather in its software cap, it’d seem. The European tech company makes apps like video editor Splice, 30 Day Fitness, Live Quiz and photo editor Remini, which combined have about 100 million users. Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari says that Bending Spoons — fresh off of a $340 million venture round — will apply its “proprietary technologies” to Evernote to “augment its usefulness” and “strengthen its reach.” “Our mission at Bending Spoons is to make an enduring positive impact on our customers, on our teammates, and on society at large. Every day, millions of people across the globe rely on Evernote to organize their lives,” Ferrari said in a statement. “As such, Evernote is a perfect fit for the Bending Spoons portfolio, and we’re delighted to be able to serve its large and loyal customer base.”

Shopify acquires Remix to bolster its storefront design tools • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 1, 2022Posted in acquisition, Apps, Commerce, Dev, react, Spotify, Startups, web developmentNo Comments

Remix, a startup developing an open source web framework similar to Next.js, has been acquired by Shopify, the companies announced in a joint statement today. The financial terms weren’t disclosed, but in a blog post, Remix CEO Michael Jackson said that Remix will receive “long-term backing and support” from Shopify that will allow it to “grow faster” and “sharpen its focus on performance and scalability.” “You’ll be seeing a lot more [of the Remix framework] in the wild, powering some of the largest commercial sites on the web,” Jackson said. “In addition, Shopify itself will use Remix across many projects, and you can expect to see more of Shopify’s developer platform include first-class support for Remix over time.” Remix was co-founded by Jackson — an ex-Twitter engineer — and Ryan Florence in 2020. The two worked together for years creating open source tools around React, a JavaScript library for building app UIs, before deciding to launch the eponymous Remix framework. One of Jackson’s and Florence’s best-known projects is React Router, a library for React, which has been downloaded almost a billion times. Not coincidentally, Shopify originally used React Router to architect Hydrogen, the company’s front-end web development framework for building custom Shopify storefronts. As for Remix, it’s a full-stack web framework that’s designed to leverage distributed systems and native browser features while abstracting away back-end server tasks. Compatible with public cloud environments, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Netlify, Vercel and Cloudflare Workers, one of Remix’s key features is prefetching — the framework can prefetch elements of a web page in parallel, including buttons and forms, before a user clicks on a link to minimize page loading. Prior to the Shopify acquisition, Remix had raised $3 million in seed capital from OSS Capital and angel investors Naval Ravikant, Ram Shriram and Sahil Lavingia. In a post on the Shopify Engineering blog, Dion Almaer, VP of engineering at Shopify, said that the purchase of Remix will benefit both Shopify developers and merchants by bringing improvements to Hydrogen. “Remix will continue to be an independent and open-source framework,” Almaer said. “Remix will tackle challenges that developers building on Hydrogen have encountered around data loading, routing, and error handling … Shopify will use Remix across many projects where it makes sense, and you can expect to see more of our developer platform with first-class Remix support over time.” Remix is Shopify’s first acquisition since Deliverr, the fulfillment tech provider that the e-commerce giant purchased in May for $2.1 billion. Earlier in the year, Shopify snatched up Dovetail, which helps brands manage influencer marketing campaigns. The company also recently invested in Single, a music and video app used by many businesses on Shopify, following equity pledges in CMS developer Sanity and marketing automation startup Klaviyo. After a rocky Q2, there are signs that Shopify is beginning to better weather the economic downturn. The company posted smaller-than-expected Q3 losses last week, leading shares to jump as high as 17%.

Four years after being acquired by Microsoft, GitHub keeps doing its thing • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on October 26, 2022Posted in acquisition, Enterprise, GitHub, Microsoft, Thomas DohmkeNo Comments

It’s been four years to the day since Microsoft closed its acquisition of GitHub, which at the time was mostly a code repository. Today’s GitHub looks quite a bit different, now that it added CI/CD tools with GitHub Actions and Codespaces as an online editor and compute platform, as well as various security tools and more. But according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke, who took over from Nat Friedman a year ago, Microsoft has very much allowed GitHub to do what it does best. “We kept GitHub GitHub and it remains this independent entity within Microsoft similar to LinkedIn,” he told me. “I think we did a fantastic job with doing this and kept GitHub in its original form. You don’t see more Microsoft in GitHub.com than you saw four years ago and that has helped us to continue to grow and we’re very excited where this is going.” He noted that GitHub has continued to receive the same support from Microsoft’s leadership team, including CEO Satya Nadella, over the years. “Microsoft has not forgotten why we did the deal in the first place and what the important pillars of the deal are. The first and foremost principle is to put developers first. And that is what we do every day,” Dohmke said. But, he also acknowledged that Microsoft is a big company and that people sometimes have their own ideas of what the Microsoft/GitHub relationship should be like. So far, though, it seems like the leadership on both sides has been able to keep those ideas at bay. Dohmke noted that GitHub has obviously benefited from Microsoft’s sales prowess, which helped it land a number of big accounts. That surely also helped the company get to the $1 billion annual recurrent revenue it announced yesterday. Dohmke said that he believes GitHub would’ve likely reached this milestone as an independent company, too. “I’m generally an optimistic person,” he said. “So any company can get there if they just stay focused on their mission. The biggest challenge that companies have once they get to a certain size is focus.” Today’s GitHub is obviously in a different position than the GitHub of four years ago. Its product portfolio, for one, has expanded quite a bit with projects like CodeSpaces and, most recently, Copilot. “I think I will have achieved my mission as CEO if we generate happy developers — happy developers who enjoy doing their job and that don’t see security, compliance and accessibility as a burden but as part of what makes them happy and what gets them to perform in their life,” Dohmke said. And projects like this are clearly a part of that. “I think, what we’re doing here is we’re disrupting ourselves with AI, with Copilot and with Codespaces, he added. “Those are all new investments that are away from the traditional GitHub — the old-school GitHub that had repos and issues and wikis — and keep pushing the boundary of what we believe is possible.” But, he also stressed, this isn’t just about big announcements and flashy events, but also focusing on the little fixes and features that may be just as important to keep developers happy. “I think that’s our superpower: that we can balance the tiny bits with big wins and the big disruptions to our own business.”