Zynga To Acquire Flock, The Social Browser That You Never Used
Zynga is acquiring Flock, a beleaguered startup founded in 2005 by Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone, we've confirmed. The deal should be announced shortly. — The company has raised nearly $30 million in venture capital, although the last round was closed in 2008.
Context & Ripple Effects
Zynga enters 2011 with serious momentum behind it: GigaOM reported in April 2010 that the social gaming company could be worth as much as $5 billion. Today TechCrunch confirms it is acquiring Flock, the social browser founded in 2005 by Bart Decrem and Geoffrey Arone — a product the headline itself describes as one "you never used."
For Flock, the deal is a soft landing after a long slide: the company raised nearly $30 million in venture capital, but its last round closed back in 2008, and it never converted its browser into meaningful usage. Absorption by a fast-scaling acquirer reads less like a product bet than a consolidation of team and assets — a textbook quasi-exit for a consumer web company whose category stalled.
First-order effects
- Flock's standalone browser effort effectively ends as its team folds into Zynga, giving backers of a company unfunded since 2008 an outcome rather than a wind-down.
- Zynga adds a consumer-web engineering group just as its valuation trajectory makes aggressive hiring and M&A cheap relative to its paper worth.
Second-order effects
- Rival social gaming and consumer internet companies now face a better-capitalized acquirer in the market for scarce social-product engineers, tightening competition for talent at the small-startup end.
- Other venture-backed consumer startups with stalled traction gain a visible template: sell to a hot platform player rather than attempt another raise.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the consumer web consolidates around a handful of scaled platforms that buy teams wholesale, while categories that fail to find mass adoption — social browsing among them — exit through absorption instead of independent growth.
- For venture portfolios holding post-2008 consumer bets, acquisitions by revenue-rich acquirers become the default resolution path where IPOs are out of reach.
The trend: Social gaming leaders are converting valuation momentum into acquisitions of consumer-web teams, turning stalled startups into talent pipelines rather than products.