That's really hard to judge, because a lot of those company's growth came after their acquisition, and we have no idea how much the parent company contributed to that either through marketing and driving traffic, and/or through capital resources and/or through talent.
I think YouTube and Instagram have probably been the best so far. LinkedIn is also very strong but because it was sold for such a high price it can’t 100x the way YouTube and Instagram likely have
I was originally skeptical about Amazon's Twitch acquisition. However, in recent years, they've seem to integrate the product fairly well into their ecosystem. I feel for an acquisition less than $1b, Twitch is a steal in hindsight. Not sure how much money Twitch makes, but the ecosystem and users only seems to be growing.
WhatsApp essentially displaced Facebook as a Social Media platform of choice whilst also spelling doom for SMS, and VoIP in one fell swoop. WhatsApp, if it was an independent company like Larry Page pleaded with them to be, would have been the next $100B tech company. I feel the founders cashed out when there was no need for them to, plus they couldn't exercise the autonomy they were promised post-acquisition.
It appears that Apple prefers to purchase IP to integrate with their existing product lines (like siri), rather than to buy up competitors for the purposes of horizontal integration (like Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp).
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 64.7 ms ] threadIE, text to get a pizza.
6.2Bil of this acquisition was written off in 2012, 5 years after the purchase.