Last week Dennis Crowley and Alex Rainert, the founders of Dodgeball decided to quit Google, the company they sold to back in 2005.
Why? Dennis explained on his blog:
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.
Dodgeball was a really interesting service, a sort of proto-Twitter that used mobile phones to mix presence and geography. So, say I was visiting New York and wanted to meet up with friends, Dodgeball would let any of my mates in the vicinity know I was around.
It's hard to say whether Google has completely killed it - and when I contacted Dennis he didn't want to comment - but not being able to keep the founders on board is a major blow and clearly the product wasn't getting much love down at the Plex. Sam Sethi takes Google to task for wasting time on 20% and failing to produce good, integrated services. I'd say that was a little harsh, but clearly there's less energy behind such products if they don't affect Google's core search/advertising business.
On the one hand, it's not unusual for entrepreneurs to leave their acquired company a year or two down the line. But a devil's advocate would ask what the point of buying companies like Dodgeball is if you're not going to invest in either them or the brains behind them.
Certainly this sort of position adds gusto to the accusation that one of the main reasons Google bought Doubleclick was to stop Microsoft from getting its hands on the company. That's one reason you might buy and kill, and it's a time-honoured one.
Are we too keen to read into such events, or is Google treading down a well-worn path?
