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The Real Cost of Acquisitions: the Zimbra Story
- sh1mmer 17y agoDepends what Yahoo! bought Zimbra for, really. You may have noticed that Yahoo! has quite a big internal mail platform... perhaps they actually wanted the technology expertise and the people more than the enterprise business. Perhaps they already extracted that value. Disclaimer: I work for Y! but not for mail and I have no insight into mail at all. Also these opinions are my own and not Y!'s.
- netsp 17y agoFrom a certain perspective, the startup complex is and extremely bizarre value creation and destruction machine. You have acquisitions like this funding (in the sense that founders and investors do this in order to achieve an acquisition like this) scores of startups who are creating real value come into being. The "successful" ones that get acquired are actually destroyed. Maybe there is some opaque value (expertise acquisition) passed to the buyer, but overall the value seems to be destroyed. The side effect though is value created via all the other startups that get founded.
- bmelton 17y agoI think often-times those types of acquisitions are just to get the talent, or the IP from the product, moreso than to launch a new product outright. Where I see problems of course is that so often startups are acquired by bigger competitors who probably have the best of intentions, but can't help but stifle the newly acquired employees into doing things 'their way'... Their way of course being the way that allowed the startup to eat up so much of their market share with minimal funding, yadda yadda.
- rishi 17y agoDoes anyone know how Zoho scaled to 300 people and 20+ products with no outside investment?