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.