
The Real Cost of Acquisitions: the Zimbra Story - dragonquest
http://blogs.zoho.com/general/the-real-cost-of-acquisitions-the-zimbra-story
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sh1mmer
Depends 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.

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Caligula
Article says $350 million.

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gjm11
I think that was "for" as in purpose, not as in cost.

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netsp
From 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.

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bmelton
I 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.

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rishi
Does anyone know how Zoho scaled to 300 people and 20+ products with no
outside investment?

