

Tech Companies Family Tree. Links between company founders and acquisitions - iamwil
http://mashable.com/2011/07/19/tech-companies-infographic/

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leelin
Very cool!

There seems to be at least one big missing piece: D. E. Shaw & Co. That would
have spun off Juno via Charles Ardai (bought by NetZero?), Amazon via Jeff
Bezos, Fog Creek for Joel Spolsky, Farsight Financial Services, and probably a
few more that I can't remember just now.

(Art of Problem Solving and Two Sigma are significant but aren't in tech).

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joshuacc
Original source: <http://mashable.com/2011/07/19/tech-companies-infographic/>

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MartinCron
Notably absent: Yahoo!

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nhebb
They left out a pretty major one - Valve.

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eugenejen
I remember when I was a teenager in 80's there are so many family trees of
different British Rock bands was listed. I am wondering someone is going to
dig data from LinkedIn, Venture capital fund portfolio history and SEC record
to draw a family tree of all technology companies around the world.

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jpdoctor
Even more interesting: Links between acquiring company execs who are limiteds
in the venture funds of the VCs who funded the acquiree.

It's a huge undisclosed conflict of interest that screws the shareholders of
the acquiring company, so don't expect to see it graphed out anytime soon.

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Timothee
I'm assuming you're talking about examples like Google acquiring YouTube,
where Sequoia was investor in both and was said by some people to have
influenced the deal to see ROI from YouTube?

Do you have examples like this? This would definitely be interesting.

edit: note that I mention the Google/YouTube example from something I remember
reading about a few years ago. I don't know what exactly happened…

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jpdoctor
Not exactly.

Look at it this way: Some financial wonk inside Google did a bunch of the due
diligence for the acquisition. Now suppose that wonk was a limited in Sequoia:
He/She would stand to make a pile of money from the acquisition of a (then)
profitless company. How would it affect the analysis?

Now go back through acquisitions that made even less financial sense, like
Ebay acquiring Skype for $2.6B. A valid question from the shareholders: Who in
the decision-making tree held stock (via a venture fund) in Skype?

I think a lot of the really dumb acquisitions start to make a lot more sense
as to how they got completed.

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a-priori
Kevin Rose used to work for PayPal? His Wikipedia page doesn't mention this.

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denysonique
Going to print and make a poster.

