What I Wish I Had Known Before Selling to Google
As a co-founder of Picnik, I was surprised by this article. It contained several errors which is pretty astonishing given its brevity. Here are a few corrections:<p>1) Sposato was not a founder of Picnik. He was hired by the two founders, myself and Darrin Massena.
2) Sposato did not decide to sell Picnik. Naturally he was very involved in the process, but the decision was ultimately made by the board (which Sposato was not on). I can tell you that it was not an easy choice. 
3) Picnik was not a "photo-sharing" site, it was a photo editing site with very limited photo sharing.
4) "One-third of our 25-person team, including my two business partners, quit right off the bat”. Both co-founders worked at Google for slightly more than a year. Sposato was there for about two years. Most of the people who left were marketing support or office management. We did lose our lead designer to Apple, but I don't recall any other product related departures in the first year.<p>Picnik was amazing. Great team, we had a lot of fun and millions of amazing customers. It was very rewarding to work on a product that your customers love. Selling was a tough choice. Picnik was very healthy, profitable and growing. We felt like we were able to capture much of that value in the sale price and also have the opportunity to work on a product at Google that we felt would have a huge impact.<p>Unfortunately for us, within our first six months Google decided to focus on Google+ and there wasn't room for any other photo product outside of Google+. I completely understood at the time why Google+ was important to Google, it just wasn't important to me. So I left. I don't know how we could have been able to predict the shift in focus to Google+ even with perfect visibility into Google. From what I gather, such a large shift in focus and investment was a unprecedented in Google before Google+.<p>I think Google is a great company, I have a super high opinion of the people that I met there. Perhaps this wasn't the optimal exit for the Picnik team, but it was pretty damn good.<p>-mike harrington