HubSpot Shares Plunge 12% as Alphabet Shelves Acquisition Plans

For context: Google had $305B in revenue in 2023 of which $240B (78.8%) came from advertising revenue, majorly selling to SMB. Hubspot had revenue of $2.17B from selling sales and marketing tools. One of the biggest challenges today is: - Correctly identifying who is the visitor on your website - Identifying other social signals of the reader of your content - Recording it in a streamlined way in the CRM - Retarget the same audience at a later point in time through other channels. The problem attributes towards the advertising spend directly to consumer acquisition and sales without a connection to the SMB’s CRM. If Google owned a CRM they could plumb in any Google advertising to automatically provide attribution. This would allow the SMB to have that direct proof of performance of customer acquisition and potentially sales data. The end result would be more SMB customers and larger spends by those customers. Future is in content-led inbound marketing. If the deal is successful there is a massive shift towards hyper-personalized content marketing.

Will we be seeing all the LinkedIn post flooding with 10 things to learn from this - like it happened during the earlier proposed acquisition

What changed for you post acquisition and how did it change your lives Context: worked at a small startup getting acquired soon by a publicly listed company

Declared for the states: We’ll pay employees during the full notification period (minimum 60 days). We’ll also offer a severance package starting at 16 weeks salary plus two weeks for every additional year at Google, and accelerate at least 16 weeks of GSU vesting. We’ll pay 2022 bonuses and remaining vacation time. We’ll be offering 6 months of healthcare, job placement services, and immigration support for those affected. Outside the US, we’ll support employees in line with local practices.

A friend of mine just got a ESOP buyback opportunity. Thing to note here is that the startup is just under 3 Years Old. Thoughts?

Any news?

VC here. Doing this for fun. Don't take all views seriously.

Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving technology unit, laid off 137 employees in its second round of layoffs this year, the company reported on Wednesday, bringing the total number of layoffs for the year to 8%. As part of the cuts, Waymo has eliminated some engineering roles to “focus on commercial success,” the company said in a statement.

Freshers impacted in software/product and data science profiles. Day 1 company in all colleges. Placement season is almost over everywhere and now these students are without a job just days before their joining date. No severance too unlike layoffs. Used to pay a lot though, 30 lakhs base salary for SDEs and 15 for product analysts after taking gruelling overnight interviews. Heard internally there struggling a lot which is reflected in their stock price which is halved from 2021 despite a bull run in US tech companies in the same period. Note to anyone thinking of getting into sprinkr(obviously in future cause they showing middle finger now): join only if you want to work like a donkey in exchange of lots of money.