Loopt押注位置共享先于智能手机；绿点支付4340万美元现金收购

做的是什么生意

Loopt was a location-based social network for mobile: friends could see each other's live whereabouts on their phones. Before app stores existed it distributed through US wireless carriers, starting with Boost Mobile, and later layered on real-time deals and loyalty offers.

启动资金：About $17M in A and B rounds from Sequoia Capital and NEA after an early Y Combinator investment, per the HN discussion.

起因

Sam Altman co-founded Loopt in 2005, with co-founders including Nick Sivo, as one of Y Combinator's early companies, at a time when the only way to put software on mobile phones was through carrier deals. The pitch was a mobile social network built around live location — friends always able to see where friends were — and the founders negotiated directly with carriers to distribute it, starting with Boost Mobile.

经过

Loopt remained tied to US carriers as the iPhone rewrote the mobile market, and the product never resonated the way it needed to; a 2011 attempt to revive the company by chasing Groupon-style real-time deals and loyalty offers died an early death. By March 2012 VentureBeat reported that daily active users had fallen to about 500 before the sale — a figure CEO Sam Altman said was off by orders of magnitude — while commenters and press alike contrasted Loopt with Foursquare, which had found a more viral way to connect people and places.

结果

On 2012-03-09 Green Dot, a publicly traded prepaid-card company that Sequoia had backed since before its 2011 IPO, acquired Loopt for about $43.4M in cash, with commenters estimating that roughly $9–10M of the proceeds was an employee-retention pool. Altman told HN the sale followed a slow realization that success required combining location with finance and payments, and that the team would pursue that vision inside Green Dot.

可借鉴之处

Loopt证明了位置共享在智能手机使之成为习惯之前就具吸引力，但随后将浪潮输给了Foursquare：先行者只有当市场到来时还在场才有意义。