GroupMe的SMS群聊赌注以Skype于2011年8月收购告终

做的是什么生意

GroupMe let people create private phone groups on the fly, text the whole group at once, and start free conference calls—group messaging as a standalone mobile service.

启动资金：$850,000 seed from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and angels; then $10.6M from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors.

起因

GroupMe was born at a hackathon at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York in 2010, founded by Jared Hecht and Steve Martocci. A couple of months after Disrupt, the company closed an $850,000 round from Betaworks, SV Angel, First Round Capital, Lerer Ventures and prominent angels.

经过

Early in 2011 GroupMe raised $10.6 million more from Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst and previous investors. By the time of the deal it had twenty employees staying in New York, and Skype CEO Tony Bates had been talking to the company for a few months—around the same time Skype was negotiating its own acquisition by Microsoft, which was still pending when the GroupMe deal was announced.

结果

Skype announced on 2011-08-21 that it would acquire the one-year-old GroupMe; terms were not disclosed. GroupMe would remain a standalone brand in New York while Skype looked for integration points over time, with Bates calling group messaging one of the most important markets for Skype and mobile the path to one billion users.

可借鉴之处

在巨头发现前赢得习惯：GroupMe在一年内让群聊成为日常行为，所以Skype选择收购而不是自己开发。