Youch! Check out the Dodgeball founders on getting acquired by Google back in May 05:
“As a two-person team, Alex and I have taken Dodgeball about a far as we can alone,” Dennis Crowley, founder of the New York-based text messaging service, wrote on the company’s Web site. (that link is now down)
And today, on quitting:
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us – especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space. And while it was a tough decision (and really disappointing) to walk away from dodgeball, I’m actually looking forward to getting to work on other projects again.
Tipping point: When it becomes cooler to leave a company than to stay there.
Kind regards,
Evan Rudowski
http://www.subhub.com
Another tipping point: when you complain that other people aren’t working hard enough on your project. Funny how other Google acquisitions (Writely, Sketchup, Keyhole, etc.) don’t seem to have this problem. Maybe dodgeball made a better demo than it did a product?
All people I know who have sold their “ideas” became really unhappy after a while. It might be the same feeling that parents have while leaving their kids with somebody else – nobody will care about them as good as they themselves.
If you expect anything other it´s an illusion – so better don´t sell your idea!