Distill is a mobile advertising start-up that is best known for developing an innovative, collaborative video-based system that is used to help hire technical talent. Yahoo has purchased this new company, but not because they wanted this new system. Yahoo is actually planning on shutting down the company itself, and hiring the top engineers to work on Yahoo’s mobile ad development team.
Distill had gotten an investment of $1.3 million several months back to help fund their company, which was primarily focused on helping other companies find, interview and evaluate engineers, programmers and other top talent. The system allowed a company to conduct interviews through a video chat service, similar to Skype. The real benefit, however, was in that same system the company could include challenges to ‘test’ the candidate.
Providing the person being interviewed with, for example, programming challenges to see if they knew how to solve them was a great way to see what type of skills the potential employee actually had. This was a very promising tool for many companies, especially given the very competitive nature of engineering or programming jobs in today’s market.
The same team of engineers that developed this system for Distill were also behind the development of Tapjoy, which is a leading performance-based mobile advertising platform. Tapjoy has gone through some controversial times, but is largely believed to have cleaned up its act now and is one of the leading performance companies in mobile marketing.
All in all, Yahoo will be acquiring seven of the top engineers from Distill, who will be focusing on Yahoo’s mobile advertising future. Some experts are calling this an extremely expensive way to hire in talent, given that Yahoo likely paid somewhere between $10 and $20 million for the company. Ever since Marissa Mayer became the CEO of Yahoo, however, the company has had no problem spending money to acquire talent or technology, and this is just the latest example of that.
