Kindo Finds a New Home

22 Sep 2008

You can read the announcement here (pdf), or get the complete FAQ here, but I wanted to give you some more background on why Kindo and MyHeritage have teamed up.

The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks before we released the first public version of Kindo. Gareth and me were invited to have lunch with him in Soho in central London, and went there with the objective of learning everything we could about the “enemy”. This proved to be pretty naive, since Gilad is much too nice to be called an “enemy”.

But there we were: A Swede, a South African and an Israeli, all with very different professional background and life stories, talking about the future of families online from very different perspectives. I didn’t expect this, but we found that we had much in common. We shared the same ideas and vision for what we wanted to achieve with our businesses, even though our approach was far from similar.

Kindo had set out to build a site that would help you interact with the family that is around you here and now. We were trying to come up with tools to help you share information and communicate with the people that matter most to you right now. MyHeritage on the other hand had developed amazing technologies to help you find out everything about your family’s history, and had spent years perfecting these technologies. Ultimately though, what interested us both was the opportunity to help families discover more about who they are and their past, and use the web to bring them closer together.

As Gareth and I travelled back on the tube, we talked about how nice it would be to be able to offer our own users the same tools as MyHeritage already had. What really got us excited was their SmartMatching Technology, which matches people in your family tree with 250 Million other names, and suggests who you might be related too. We liked that. We were also jealous of Gilad, since he got to develop features for 25 million registered users - slightly bigger than our own user base…

During this summer, we’ve been thinking long and hard about the future of Kindo, and what the best option would be for taking Kindo to the next level. The more time we spent with Gilad as well as the rest of the team in Israel (not to mention the very loud rooster that runs around in their campus), the more convinced we all became - we’ll be better off together.

So we join the MyHeritage family because we share the same vision and values (as families should), and because we think that we can build an amazing product together – bringing real benefits to families around the world. This is what we’re planning to do over the next years.

As you see from the smiles in the picture below, this is a happy day for us here in the Putney Offices.

Nils and the Kindo family

Posted by Nils Hammar in Design, Development | Trackback |

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17 Responses to “Kindo Finds a New Home”

  1. Caffeinehit Ltd - Web Design & Graphic Design, London » Blog Archive » Kindo merges with MyHeritage On:
    22 Sep 2008 At 0:48

    [...] the official press release from the Kindo website: The first time we met Gilad, the founder and CEO of Myheritage, was in early 2007 – a few weeks [...]

  2. MyHeritage Buys Kindo, Moves Towards Family Monopoly | tinyCrunch On:
    22 Sep 2008 At 1:32

    [...] tiny from: TechCrunch.com, Kindo Blog Share and [...]

  3. Tony On:
    22 Sep 2008 At 2:11

    Congratulations to MyHeritage for recognizing a great team and company. Nice job Kindo!

  4. Kevin Chen On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 11:59

    Congratulations to both MyHeritage and Kindo. I think many startups are looking at the family social networking and history space very closely. What’s interesting is how these startups approach the question differently, whether it is from family trees, timelines, genealogical research, or social networking. Congratulations again, and looking forward to seeing what the sites look like together!

  5. TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Fast exit - UK’s Kindo acquired by Israel’s MyHeritage On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 13:16

    [...] Kindo’s own blog sets out more of the detail behind the [...]

  6. Eddie G On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 14:19

    Congratulations! There’s no better feeling than the feeling of doing something good for people. Best of luck.

    /Eddie på SCH

  7. MyHeritage adds another branch to its tree: Kindo On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 14:41

    [...] to add the European family tree service is undisclosed. Read the story behind the acquisition on the Kindo blog. I hope you like that post! The Next Web Blog covers start-up news from all over the world (not [...]

  8. MyHeritage acquires family social network Kindo « DrewPreston On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 14:58

    [...] perspective and thanks to the team involved in another post. The full story was shown on the Kindo blog. The news made it in some prominent blogs such as Techrunch UK, VentureBeat, Techcrunch, [...]

  9. » MyHeritage Acquires Family Social Network Kindo for Next Generation Family Tree » Social Networking Blog - SociableBlog.com On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 15:09

    [...] the Kindo team to MyHeritage puts the company in an even stronger position to realize its vision of connecting [...]

  10. Post Express » Blog Archive » Kindo + MyHeritage = Facebook estilo familiar? On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 16:50

    [...] valor da aquisição não foi divulgado. E eles dizem, oficialmente, que a união do Kindo com o MyHeritage vai criar uma espécie de “Facebook para famílias” (já que o Facebook é [...]

  11. MyHeritage schluckt Kindo :: deutsche-startups.de On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 17:35

    [...] paneuropäische Familien-Community Kindo (www.kindo.de) schlüpft unter das Dach von MyHeritage (www.myheritage.com), einem israelischen Stammbaum-Start-up. Die Familien-Community [...]

  12.   Kindo + MyHeritage = Facebook estilo familiar? by Zumo Blog: Tecnologia. Opinião. Inteligência. On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 19:29

    [...] valor da aquisição não foi divulgado. E eles dizem, oficialmente, que a união do Kindo com o MyHeritage vai criar uma espécie de “Facebook para famílias” (já que o [...]

  13. BuzzMag On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 19:59

    Super-rychlý exit rodinné social sítÄ Kindo…

    Britský startup Kindo.com, který se zamÄřuje na rodinné rodokmeny byl po své roÄní existenci pohlcen izraelským MyHeritage, který se tÄší přízni 25 milionů uživatelů a do kterého nedávno investovali Accel Partners a Index Ventures.
    …

  14. cngIT » Blog Archive » Fast exit - UK’s Kindo acquired by Israel’s MyHeritage On:
    23 Sep 2008 At 2:53

    [...] but it’s a fast exit for Kindo which only launched last year. Although Kindo says on their blog that the buy-out took place because “we share the same vision and values”, I think it [...]

  15. onkel-mario On:
    24 Sep 2008 At 18:23

    Thanks a lot everybody. Great to hear that you share our happiness!

    Hope you stay tuned with what will be going on in the new Kind-MyHeritage family.

    Mario

  16. Shake and bake baby - MyHeritage buys Kindo at oneafrikan.com On:
    29 Sep 2008 At 23:37

    [...] story on the Kindo blog. Seen on Techrunch UK, VentureBeat, Techcrunch US, paidContent and PHP Kitchen to mention a few of [...]

  17. tinyComb » Blog Archive » MyHeritage Buys Kindo, Moves Towards Family Monopoly On:
    2 Dec 2008 At 23:21

    [...] tiny from: TechCrunch.com, Kindo Blog View Jason Wilk’s Profile      Subscribe via RSS RelatedBookmarksTags [...]

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