So Mergerize is definitely a very raw MVP, we built it in a week as a labs project at Estimize, and one of the questions we had about the site was, what type of cadence was going to take place with traffic and contribution. The system right now doesn't encourage people to input the same prediction twice (same target same acquirer). But it's very valuable for everyone to understand how popular a certain target/acquirer pair is relative to the other pairs. For example, will it be Google or Yahoo who buys Yelp? We don't see a lot of that thus far. But the Product Hunt type upvoting system might solve that by easily allowing someone to replicate a deal and comment on it. This is most likely the next iteration of the site.
I am a little confused - how's Twitter "going to be acquired in 2015" given that it's a public company?
Although technically not impossible, highly unlikely.
@ldrogen do you see Mergerize as more of a fun social site or a utility for investors? There's an argument for the "wisdom of the crowds" but the public lacks insight and data to make very qualified predictions, imo.
Here's the blog post I wrote when we launched it, I think everything in there still holds true.
http://blog.estimize.com/post/80...
I'm a heavy believer in wisdom of crowds, on a few levels. 1) the crowd is a great indicator of sentiment, and it's extremely important to understand sentiment regardless of accuracy. Compiling a structured searchable data set of expectations is I think, especially for M&A, important in and of itself. 2) wisdom of the crowds does in many cases produce more accurate predictions. In this case I'm not sure what it would be more accurate than, I guess maybe some individual event driven hedge fund analyst or investment banker? We're kind of breaking new ground here so there really isn't a comparable to say we're more/less accurate than.
At the end of the day I've seen what the power of the crowd can do at Estimize, our data set is more accurate than the wall street bank analysts 75% of the time, and over half of our contributors are not professional investors. In fact, we know that the non pros are actually more accurate on average than the pros. So I would suspend judgement on whether or not the public has enough insight to do anything these days, let the statistics talk for themselves, and take each individual prediction with a huge grain of salt.
I don't really see the value in Mergerize as a place where deals get leaked, although that may end up happening too. I see the value more in people saying that they either believe a company is going to get taken out, or that an acquirer should take them out, both are valuable for people to know.
Just my view, Mergerize definitely an experiment, but one that we think will add a bunch of value to the ecosystem as it scales.
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