TELLME BEING ACQUIRED BY MICROSOFT... FORMER COMPETITOR, OLD MEMORIES

GigaOM is reporting that Tellme will be bought for $800 million or more. Congratulations to their founders and team! Brings back old memories when we competed against Tellme. Tellme raised an incredible $239 million in 2000. Then there was BeVocal and HeyAnita, my old company. My friends and I introduced the HeyAnita founders to Softbank and then they recruited us to help them expand into Asia. So my friends and I started HeyAnita Korea back in early 2000.

Tellme's founders were the golden boys from Netscape and Microsoft, and our founders were less shiny, older guys from Microsoft. For various reasons, such as being underfunded and management missteps, HeyAnita eventually closed down their U.S. operations a couple years ago. To Tellme's credit, they executed well with some bumps along the way but eventually became profitable and hit over $100 million in revenues. Somewhere here there is a great case study on the factors for successful and failed startups.

TechCrunch has more here.