2x year-over-year user growth; high-profile talent poaches; and interest in its enterprise potential all likely contributed the hype.
While many service providers are accustomed to having their talent poached by clients, few have built a business model around it — until now.
With rock-star talent poached from Google and tides lifting all automated boats, Formant's biggest threat is competition from tech giants.
It's gone towards building out the product and bringing the Mountain View-based BloomReach's employee count to 60 with talent poached from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Bing.
Saudi Arabia, for example, has embarked upon a vast multi-billion education agenda, building with it what is billed to be the region's best technical university with talent poached from the likes of UC Berkeley, MIT and Caltech, King Abdulla University of Science and Technology (KAUST).
Ironically, tech companies such as Optibase are now poaching talent from the IDF with higher salaries.
Quite often this mutual learning is not exactly good-natured, but results instead from poaching talent from competitors.
But insisting that everyone normally show up is risky at a time when tech firms are ruthlessly poaching talent from rivals.
THE creator of Wildwood Barbecue, Stephen Hanson, founder and president of B.R. Guest Restaurants, a New York company with 16 restaurants, acknowledges poaching talent.
As for poaching talent from Fannie Mae, he says: "In industries like this it's a small pool to draw from.
Poaching talent through the "acqhire" model isn't just for giant consumer-facing web services.
