Acquisition

This is a line my friend Jerry Colonna uses when something like the AT&T – Time Warner deal occurs. As time passes, the line has shifted to “We were right – just fifteen years early.” Jerry was Fred Wilson ‘s partner at Flatiron Partners. We were all investing in Internet-related stuff at the end of the 1990s. Jerry and Fred had one of the most successful VC funds during this time period until the Internet bubble burst and blew us all up for a while. We made plenty of investments together and I sat on a number of boards with Jerry – we had some big winners and a handful of craters in the ground. ...

Recently I wrote about how I think about private company acquisition strategies using FullContact as the example of one where it is working well . Last week I was at a board meeting for a different company which did an acquisition a month ago. I heard a fantastic line from the founder of the company that had been acquired. It’s business as usual except better. Now, it’s only a month in. But this is what an investor loves to hear after a month. ...

When we invested in FullContact in 2012, they were a small team with a big vision to create One Address Book To Rule Them All . Over the past four years, they’ve systematically executed on their vision, building a contact management platform that touches all aspects of the problem . Along the way they built a sizable business. Two weeks ago FullContact raised a $25 million round. They followed this up with two acquisitions – first Conspire and then Profoundis. ...

We’ve seen several M&A deals collapse unexpectedly in the past two months. Each was at the signed LOI stage. There was no warning or evidence of an issue until the moment the CEO got the phone call from the acquirer saying the deal was off. In both cases, the explanation was vague. I’ve also seen several financings fail to close recently. Two of them were late stage financings that were pulled by the investor at the last second. One of these investors is highly visible for doing late stage deals. The other was an investor I didn’t know much about. The explanation I heard from the founder in each case was again vague. ...

I hope you had a nice 4th of July yesterday. Amy and I hid out all day in Longmont, playing with the dogs, napping, and reading. As a result yesterday was a three book day. One of them was Semi-Organic Growth: Tactics and Strategies Behind Google’s Success by George T. Geis. If you are a Google watcher, aspire to have you company acquired by Google some day, or just want to understand Google’s approach to acquisitions (which Geis calls “semi-organic growth”) this is a must read book that is well worth the money. ...

Congrats to my friends at Rally Software on the announcement that they’ve signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by CA Technologies for $480 million . Part of the fun of having a blog for a long time is that it captures some of the history – in the moment – of what’s going on. For example, from a post in 2008 about Rally’s $16.85m financing , I riffed on the origins of the company. ...

There’s an amazing amount of bad activity going on in the world of tech right now. It’s predictable – when things start going well the switch flips from fear back to greed and all sorts of craziness ensues. One of the things I see appear is a steady stream of crap aimed at innovators. Patent trolls are an easy one, but heavy handed regulatory activity by incumbents and random lawsuits around acquisitions are also part for the course. ...

I love playing offense. FullContact is officially in this mode and today announced that they have acquired Cobook with Pot, Ski Passes and Dogecoin. Kaspars Dancis – the awesome CEO of Cobook – has a more seriously titled (and equally serious post) up at COBOOK + FULLCONTACT . One of my basic strategies as an investor is to use targeted small acquisitions throughout the life of a company. In 2005 Fred Wilson called this approach the “venture rollup ” and said nice words about me and it in his post when he said “My good friend Brad Feld is up to his old tricks. Brad is the master of the venture rollup.” ...

When I saw this graph I was hooked. If you are a Twitter user and you don’t use Followerwonk , go try it now – I’ll be here when you return. Yesterday, SEOmoz announced that it had acquired Followerwonk . The acquisition closed about six weeks ago and the Followerwonk product has been fully integrated into SEOmoz . And the Followerwonk team is now fully part of the SEOmoz team. And it’s awesome. ...

Today one of our portfolio companies BigDoor announced the acquisition of San Francisco-based OneTrueFan , a community and web check-in company. We invested in BigDoor a little over a year ago and they’ve made amazing progress on their gamified loyalty platform since then. In addition to having over 300 live customers, BigDoor is also conducting a private beta of a truly innovative solution that they call the Engagement Economy, and we expect it have long lasting implications on how the digital world engages and monetizes their audiences. ...