Let's start with the basics. What is Lala? You might be wondering, it doesn't really appeal to you as a service and you've probably never heard of it.
Before 2009 it was the number 1 online music distribution service long before Spotify or Pandora and it really had a huge future. It was no coincidence that if you put the name of a song in a search engine then the first link you would see would be from Lala's site.
Many companies were interested in its service and after several negotiations, Apple acquired it in 2009 and Lala.com closed in May 2010.
At the time, the news did not go unnoticed, with Apple paying $80 million for its acquisition, without any further information ever being provided to this day.
Aubrey Johnson, the designer of the service at the time, today reveals details of this acquisition starring none other than Steve Jobs.
Lala founder Bill Nguyen had immediate acquisition offers from both Google and Nokia at the time. However, he didn't want to accept either offer because they were too small for his vision. So he didn't hesitate to pursue a meeting with Steve Jobs and even insisted on it.
Finally, his request was granted and Steve Jobs invited him to his home in Palo Alto for dinner in the presence of Tim Cook and Eddy Cue. There, Steve Jobs, as usual, looked him in the eye for a few minutes and then began by saying:
"Bill, I'll give you a number and if you like it, let's finish it," he then handed him a piece of paper that had the acquisition amount written down. It could have been a scene from The Godfather trilogy, but this was how Steve Jobs closed the deals that interested him.
In late November, Nguyen was seated at the dinner table in Steve Job's home on Waverly St in Palo Alto. Also present were Eddy Cue and Tim Cook and other Apple executives. Steve led the conversation while eating a beet salad:
"I'm going to give you a number, Bill, and if you like it, let's do it and just be done with this whole thing. Okay?" Bill agreed.
Jobs passed a piece of paper to Nguyen and Bill nodded. The deal was done.
Of course, Bill Nguyen accepted, especially since the best offer he had up until then was the $11 million offered by Nokia.
The story doesn't end there, as the acquisition took a turn that only Steve Jobs could have imagined. Lala's staff moved to Apple while they were given various bonuses and Apple shares. Bill Nguyen didn't stay long, however, and so he left to create another successful app of his own called Color, which had received excellent reviews back in 2011.
Lala's engineers and designers also left Apple, leaving behind the shares they had been given from the original agreement and followed the vision of Color. Of course, the application after a year failed to bring in the profits that Bill Nguyen had imagined and so Steve Jobs ordered the engineers who had left Apple to be hired back. Of course, after their departure, they could not negotiate much and so Apple managed to bring them back for only $2 million in total.
Just a fantastic story.
Since then, the engineers have remained loyal to Apple and were the workers of iTunes Match, while Cupertino circles report that they did not stop working on what they really loved and that was none other than the Lala service. It will be particularly interesting to see if Lala will come to life this year in the form of iRadio, which Apple is said to be preparing as a direct answer to Spotify.
Dimitrios Georgoulas @ GreekAppleNews
