Tony Avelar--Bloomberg/Getty Images Signage outside the Google Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California on Oct. 13, 2010.
As tech's largest firms grow in scope and age, acquisitions have become an increasingly important maneuver
In late October John Hanke and several of his co-workers met for a reunion of sorts at Fiesta Del Mar, a Mexican restaurant near Google's Mountain View headquarters. Hanke, a 10-year Google employee who led initial development of Maps, was once the founder of a small geodata startup called Keyhole that Google acquired in 2004. The fact that the one-time entrepreneur has stayed with the search giant for more than a decade makes him and his colleagues oddities in Silicon Valley. "There are quite a large number of [us] who are still at Google, and I have to say I don't think anyone expected that when we first came in," he says.
Google has used acquisitions to expand its workforce and launch new products since before it was a household name. Recently that strategy has become the modus operandi for technology firms in Silicon Valley. Facebook is using its fast-growing cash hoard to take control over sectors both adjacent to its core product (WhatsApp for $22 billion) and far-flung from social networking (Oculus VR for $2 billion). Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are doing the same, making big-ticket bets by buying Minecraft developer Mojang ($2.5 billion), Tumblr ($1.1 billion) and video game streaming site Twitch ($970 million), respectively. Even Apple, which long eschewed splashy acquisitions in favor of much smaller, less public buys, says it bought at least 30 companies during the last fiscal year, including the $3 billion purchase of Beats.
Overall spending on tech acquisitions topped $170 billion in 2014, up 54% from the previous year and more than double the amount spent in 2010, according to PrivCo, a research firm that tracks investments in private businesses. As the core of dominant technology companies get larger, they have come to depend on acquisitions not only to broaden their businesses but also to sustain the pace of innovation. "Companies are buying innovation," explains Peter Levine, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. "As large companies need to be competitive and want to increase their footprints in a variety of different areas, one of the best ways to do that is through acquisition."
The deals are a boon for startups as well. Venture capital is abundant, and companies can rely on investment rather than revenue to keep growing. If it's not clear how a startup will eventually convert users into revenue, a buyout from a large firm can render that problem irrelevant--or at least less urgent. While investors and founders insist that launching a thriving self-supporting company is still the end-goal in Silicon Valley, "exiting" via a sale rather than an initial public offering can still net a lucrative payout. "It's almost a goal for some of these companies as they start, to have that exit event," says George Geis, a law professor at UCLA whose upcoming book, Semi-Organic Growth, analyzes Google's acquisition strategy over the years.
But while snapping up a startup is now easy, holding onto its key employees is more difficult. Startup founders, who often think of themselves as entrepreneurs before engineers, are notoriously difficult to keep at large firms long. Partly, this is cultural: striking out on one's own, idea in hand, is a fundamental part of the Silicon Valley ethos. The widespread availability of funding doesn't hurt, either. That has left firms struggling to keep the expertise they may have spent millions acquiring. "When a firm is making a tech acquisition, they're buying the talent as much as they're buying the technology," says Brian JM Quinn, a law professor specializing in mergers and acquisitions at Boston College.
A TIME analysis of startup founders' LinkedIn profiles found that about two-thirds of the startup founders that accepted jobs at Google between 2006 and 2014 are still with the company. Amazon has retained about 55% of its founders over that time period, while Microsoft's rate is below 45%. Facebook, with a 75% retention rate for founders, is beating its older competitors, but the company only began acquiring companies in significant numbers around 2010 or so. Yahoo and Apple, which have both gone on acquisition sprees under new CEOs Marissa Mayer and Tim Cook in the last two years, now have a similar retention rate to Google.
Google stands out among this cohort in large part because of the massive number of acquisitions it's conducted. Overall at least 221 startup founders joined Google's ranks between 2006 and 2014. Yahoo, the next closest competitor, added at least 110 founders to its employee roster in that time. Google's internal calculation of its overall retention rate for startup founders through its history is similar to TIME's, according to data provided by the company. Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft declined to share any information on the retention of founders; Amazon did not respond to a request for data.
An examination of the ways Google tries to retain employees provides a window into the increasingly ferocious battle among the tech sector's giants to expand through conquest. "Google," says Geis, "has done a pretty good job--among the best in Silicon Valley."
'The toothbrush test'
Even when Google was small, it wasn't shy about spending. The company's first startup acquisition, the 2003 purchase of Pyra Labs, forms the backbone of what is today Blogger, an online publishing platform. Since then, many of Google's most well-known products, including Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs and Analytics, have originated from acquisitions. "MA has obviously been a huge part of Google--and, I think, Google's success--for a long time," says Don Harrison, Google's vice president for corporate development, who oversees the company's acquisitions.
Before any deal is finalized, it has to pass what CEO Larry Page calls "the toothbrush test": is the product something you use daily and would make your life better? "If anything matches the toothbrush test and relates to technology, then Larry has an interest in it," explains Harrison.
Typically, Google buys occur in sectors where the company has already been experimenting itself. Harrison points to YouTube as a prime example. Google already had a video sharing service called Google Video in the mid-2000's, but YouTube's fast-growing user base convinced the firm to offer a then-eye-popping $1.65 billion for the startup, even though it was barely a year old and earned no revenue. Today, YouTube brings in billions of dollars of revenue per year and is the third most-visited website in the world, according to Web analytics firm Alexa.
But the return on investment on an acquisition isn't only measured monetarily. It's important to Google and other tech giants that the founders behind ideas worth paying for stick around as well. Harrison says founder retention is one of the significant factors Google measures as part of the "scorecarding" it does to evaluate its purchases. "We hold ourselves accountable to make sure that the founders are able to be successful within Google," Harrison says. "It's something that we're not only working on at the time we buy the company but we work on for years after as well."
Cash alone can't convince the top startup founders to join Google. 2014 was the most active year for IPOs in the U.S. since the year 2000, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital, and Chinese online retailer Alibaba had the biggest public debut in world history, raising $25 billion in September. "As aggressive as we're willing to be, we probably can't match public company premiums right now," Harrison admits.
So Google tries to find other ways to lure key talent.
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