 (left) Woot CEO Matt Rutledge, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos (Source: Woot)
“Matt Rutledge revealed to be monstrous pseudo-human creation of Jeff Bezos.” -- Woot CEO Matt Rutledge
Amazon acquired the snarky deal-of-the-day website Woot yesterday, The Dallas News reports, for a price tag of $110 million in cold, hard cash. And according to an e-mail sent out to all Woot employees by CEO Matt Rutledge, some free downloads were thrown in for good measure:
We think now is the right time to join with Amazon because, quite simply, every company that becomes a subsidiary gets two free downloads until the end of July, and we very much need that new thing with Trent Reznor’s wife on our iPods.
Woot, which runs special daily promotions on an assortment of products, will continue to operate independently, with Amazon acting more-or-less as a financial backer, similar to Amazon's previous acquisitions of Zappos and Audible.
"It will be easier to run an aggressive-growth company when you have the backing of a big operation like Amazon," Rutledge told The News.
In his e-mail to employees, Rutledge assured them that the culture of the young, irreverent company will not change. The company's founder also stated that he will remain CEO.
Here are some highlights from the e-mail:
From a practical point of view, it will be as if we are simply adding one person to the organizational hierarchy, except that one person will just happen to be a billion-dollar company that could buy and sell each and every one of you like you were office furniture.
...
They’re not looking to have their folks come in and run Woot unless we ask them to, which incidentally you can do by turning off the bathroom lights and saying the word “Kindle” three times; a helpful Amazon employee will appear in the mirror.
...
And we need a powerful ally in case Steve Jobs finally breaks down and comes after us for all our Apple jokes over the years. Don’t think of it as a buyout; think of it as NATO!
"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." -- Robert Heinlein
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