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The deal of the century was when SAIC bought Network Solutions for $4.7M in 1995. Five years later, they sold it to VeriSign for $21B.
by raldi 10y ago
The deal of the century was when SAIC bought Network Solutions for $4.7M in 1995.
Five years later, they sold it to VeriSign for $21B.
- ralfd 10y ago4 years?? Holy shit, what a return.
- babuskov 10y agoThat's interesting. I also read it as "Four", but now I look at it and it reads "five". Could be some brain trick.
- hamilyon2 10y agoSame for me. Very interesting. Non-native speaker from mobile device
- situationista 10y agoSame. Fascinating.
- Quinner 10y agoInteresting, same here, perhaps we actually processed the numeral in the child comment subconsciously while reading the written-out five in the parent.
- euyyn 10y agoOr the numeral in the buy price.
- babuskov 10y agoThis seems more plausible, because the initial comment only had that one.
- brianpan 10y ago> only had that one. Did it? The deal of the century was when SAIC bought Network Solutions for $4.7M in 1995. Five years later, they sold it to VeriSign for $21B.
- babuskov 10y agoYou misunderstood. He couldn't see a comment on his own post because it wasn't written yet. He could only see the $4.7M which you quoted.
- Keyframe 10y agoSame, must be a caching issue with that 4 in the sentence before (F our F ive)... hail mary attempt at explanation.
- vidarh 10y agoThat's what happens when get to buy a company with a fixed price government contract at a low-ish multiple of the contract value (fair enough price based on the contract), that you can get revised to let you charge end-users for the service months later in a field that's growing at a ridiculous rate.
- raldi 10y agoNetwork Solutions was getting paid per registration even under the original contract; it's just that it was originally the National Science Foundation that was obligated to foot the bill for each domain. That's why the government was so eager to renegotiate.
- coldcode 10y agoHedge fund bought Skype for around $1B and sold it to MS for $8B
- cloudjacker 10y agoSo let this be a lesson in ROI 4.7m to 21B is more impressive
- adventured 10y agoSoftbank bought roughly 1/3 of Alibaba for $20 million. A stake worth ~$63 billion today That's the deal of the century (so far). Also worth noting, SAIC did not own 100% of Network Solutions when it was bought from the public market by Verisign. SAIC had sold off a massive stake in the company by that point. They basically liquidated 80% of their ownership in Network Solutions for about three billion dollars over several years (at the IPO point, and then multiple secondary offerings). For example, it sold off 38% of Network Solutions for $765 million in February 1999 in a secondary offering, and then another 21% for $1.8 billion later.
- bitserf 10y agoA similar deal was Naspers buying 45% of Tencent for $34 million (current size of stake is around 34%), worth roughly $70 billion.