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Honest question: are there any happy acquisition stories? Like, a big company acquired a startup and with startup's vision and big company's resources it achiev
by oytis 2y ago
Honest question: are there any happy acquisition stories? Like, a big company acquired a startup and with startup's vision and big company's resources it achieved success to the glory of the acquirer?
- boznz 2y agoMy guess is no, 1. Remove the competition, 2. Milk the IP, 3. Good staff eventually leave as they now become a tiny cog.
- newsclues 2y agoApple NeXT and PA Semi?
- donavanm 2y agoAnd Intrinsity.
- xenospn 2y agoWaze, Android, face.com, Shazam, GitHub - there’s tons but they don’t make headlines if everything works.
- zem 2y agogoogle has botched or killed any number of acquisitions, but google earth and google docs are spectacular success stories that involved acquiring practically unknown startups and then scaling them way up. (I do realise this is likely a simplification of the actual stories behind them.)
- dismalaf 2y agoGoogle has a fair amount of successful acquisitions. YouTube, Android, Google Photos and a ton of others that ended up being Google products. Just look at this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisit...
- dilyevsky 2y agoAside from the ones you mentioned, DoubleClick is probably their biggest success story. ITA (google flights) also pretty good
- rstuart4133 2y agoGoogle was a originally search company, but from what I can see their major success was figuring out how to run computer systems at reliably and at scale before anyone else. Everything else you see now - Ads, Maps, Android, Waymo, Youtube was a weed translated onto that infrastructure that went onto thrive. Yeah, there were many, many more weeds that didn't survive the transplant. But since they didn't cost Google much they don't matter. Given what you see from Google now is dominated by the "everything else" (I doubt even losing search would be fatal), Google is a poster boy for growing a technology company by acquiring new products. Given the rumours about their ongoing cultural shift (I'm sure Intel was like Google at one stage), this may not continue. But for new Google is the exemplar for now to do this right.
- wmf 2y agoCisco and EMC are mostly acquisitions at this point.
- softwaredoug 2y agoI think many pure businesses have been acquired successfully (ie YouTube). But the tech acquisitions require very careful management. The hard part is after the acquisition, when tech and culture need to ge. Leadership likes to declare victory when the acquisition closes.
- edanm 2y agoApple acquiring Next. Facebook acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp.
- rat87 2y agoor Next acquiring Apple for -$245,000,000
- anon291 2y agoAndroid. Mellanox
- achierius 2y agoApple w/ PASemi and Beats; Qualcomm w/ Nuvia. Google w/ Motorola Mobility, and Looker, and Kaggle.
- pcthrowaway 2y agoNot sure about "the original vision", but by many metrics I believe Youtube was a successful acquisition story