Joined 15 years ago
As far as I can tell, Loopt wasn't doing very well. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=loopt.com&cmpt=... They had an attempt to revive the company to compete with Groupon last year that many here thought was stupid and died an early death (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2696412)
Michael Moritz (Sequoia partner) is still on the board of Green Dot, now a publicly traded company worth north of a billion dollars. Almost the entire board (http://ir.greendot.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=235286&p=irol-gov... ) is Private Equity/VC guys, they do this kind of inside baseball all the time, it's no sweat off their back to do Moritz a favor.
He convinces Green Dot to acquire Loopt for a huge amount of cash (Green Dot was sitting on $225 million in cash). Sequoia makes a cool $15 million.
Related: the always-informative Planet Money did a special on Private Equity and you can see how Bain Capital got its money back on a company that went bankrupt: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/02/23/147257517/how-mitt... TL;DR the company they bought acquired another company and raised significant debt- they used that debt to pay back Bain Capital.
And lockheed (who has the backscatter contract) donates money all over the place: http://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/lookup2.php?strID=C00303024
Follow the money, as always.
And they make it pretty darned easy to apply. There are some other interesting numbers in this infographic - salaries and such: http://img.gtricks.com/2011/10/job-in-google.png
Between the 2 options it is more of a personal choice, but one will become more clear if you have an offer. I'd suggest posting it on those flippa type sites at what you're willing to sell for and seeing if anyone bites.
and the product: http://letsfreckle.com/
