Sosh Acquires Hopscotch to Bring Online Offline

Sōsh, a prelaunch start-up built to help people discover offline activities, has made its first acquisition. It’s also made its first two hires. The company told AllThingsD today that it recently bought the two-man start-up Hopscotch.

Rishi Mandal said today that he and his two Sōsh co-founders, who all previously worked at Slide until after it was acquired by Google, had interviewed dozens of people to be their first employees. But they didn’t feel like the potential hires they found were as entrepreneurial as they were. Ultimately, it seemed to make the most sense to buy Hopscotch, a QR code-scanning start-up that just finished the second edition of the AngelPad start-up incubator program three months ago.

Hopscotch co-founders Danyal Anik and Salil Apte have joined Sōsh, while engineer Vishal Nayak declined because he’s more interested in gaming.

Mandal didn’t disclose the price of the acquisition, but said it was more than he would have paid for regular employees, and that it included significant equity in Sōsh, which has only raised $1 million itself (from investors such as Keith Rabois, Naval Ravikant, Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures).

On the plus side, the acquisition took less than two weeks from start to finish, a far cry from the pace of deals at larger companies.

Mandal said it helped that he knew Anik from high school, and that the two companies had similar missions of helping people participate and have fun in the offline world.

Mandal said Sōsh has no plans to shut down or develop the existing Hopscotch app. (Sōsh is currently Web-only, though a mobile version is in the works.)

Meanwhile, Hopscotch is the first true exit for AngelPad, according to program leader Thomas Korte. He said to expect many more such deals.

“There’s an enormous amount of companies being formed right now, so you’ll see more opportunities to join forces,” Korte said.

“You have to look at your equity to [hire good] talent. You don’t want to compete with Google and Facebook offering $200,000 engineering salaries — you want that entrepreneurial heart who can take something and run.”

As an investor, Korte was happy with getting his money back plus a little extra after three months, he said, mostly because the Hopscotch team now has a successful experience under their belts. “It was a classic example of shooting for the moon,” he said. At Sōsh, “it’s much more likely that part of that vision will be seen through.”