Most notable products from tech companies were originally acquisitions. Free cash flow means fast-growing startups can acquire to expand or acquire to turn a flywheel. For companies like Google, any company that provided more data or more searches was a prime target for acquisition. Here's a list of some some everyday products that we know and associate with large tech companies that started somewhere else.
Acquiree
Acquirer
Price
Year
PowerPoint
Microsoft
$14M
1987
Photoshop
Adobe
$35M
1995
Chipsoft (TurboTax)
Intuit
$225M
1993
86-DOS
Microsoft
$50,000
1981
Android
$50M
2005
Pixar
Steve Jobs
$10M
1986
YouTube
$1.65B
2006
$1B
2012
eBay
PayPal
$1.5B
2002
Applied Semantics (Google AdSense)
$102M
2003
NeXT (Steve Jobs)
Apple
$400M
1996
VMWare
EMC
$635M
2003
Booking.com
Priceline
$135M
2005
DoubleClick
$3.1B
2007
Where2 (Google Maps)
<$50M
2004
$19B
2014
Venmo
Braintree
$26M
2012
Some honorable mentions:
"Too early to tell" where they rank, but some more recent acquisitions.
- Twitch/Amazon – $970M, 2014
- GitHub/Microsoft – $7.5B, 2018
- Mojang (Minecraft)/Microsoft – $2.5B, 2014
- ARM/Softbank – $31B, 2016
- Deepmind/Google – $500M, 2014
Not true acquisitions, but investments that owned a substantial part of a growing business.
- Naspers (a South African publishing company) acquired 46.5% of Tencent in 2001 for only $34M.
- Tencent acquired 40% of Epic Games in 2012 for $330M
- Softbank acquired 34% of Alibaba in 2000 for $20M.