I was really surprised by some of the picks too. I'd never even heard of AddHer.com. Snipd just launched; it's kinda cool, but the jury's still out on it. Many other ones, I've seen lots of press coverage for but never actually met anyone who uses them (Loopt? Xobni?).
Where is RescueTime? SnapTalent? JamGlue? TheSixtyOne? All these are arguably more popular than the companies on the list.
It also doesn't include some of the early acquisitions like Zenter, Parakey, and Auctomactic, yet Omnisio is #1 for their $15M exit.
"thesixtyone" -- we're actually not YC, although we do fit the descrip of 2 guys in an apartment. thanks for the shout out.
also, xobni's fairly popular amongst the outlook crowd. i went back to my university for an alum interview and was surprised to discover that a lot of the office computers had been setup with xobni. killer app? search.
Wufoo is absolutely killing it. They are way beyond early signs of traction (if that's who you were referring to). Disregard this comment if you were referring to the list as a whole.
Aucto was a talent acquisition, which is obviously fine. The founders got relatively rich and can be considered successful. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe there were 4 founders so afters taxes, fees & TPS they probably walked away with between 500k-900k depending how good their accountant is. This rocks for the amount of man hours put in, but it isn't enough to never ever have to work again.
I think it's hard to call the vast majority of talent acquisitions a success (for investors, not founders), because it's too difficult to tell either way what would have happened. Look what happened with Skype then look what happened with Weblogs.