The Great Tech Sale

Entrepreneurship in technology is all about two things – big ideas and big money, says a technology fan.

AD: Hi, have you been following the news on Instagram?

BC: What’s that?

AD: A free mobile app for photo sharing… They were bought by Facebook for a billion dollars.

BC: An app that makes you a billionaire – how cool is that? But all that money for a free download?

AD: That’s the power of a big idea…

BC: It’s a pity that I’m an old-timer, otherwise…

AD: Tim Zagat, the co-founder of Zagat, a hotel rating company, was over 70 when Google bought it for around $ 150 million.

BC: That hurts…

AD: The under-30 brigade has made it too. Haroon Mirza, along with two other partners, formed CognoVision, a company that produced software for tracking ads through facial recognition. He became a millionaire at 29.

BC: Don’t know about facial recognition, but Intel can be credited for talent recognition. Guess you need to have the mental make-up for such greatness…  

AD: Even make-up sells - Mariam Naficy and Varsha Rao made $110 million by selling their online make-up company, Eve, to Idealab.

BC: Good to know that Indians have also benefited from technology…

AD: Facebook’s next acquisition, Tagtile, is a mobile royalty rewards company started by Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar, both of Indian origin.

BC: And who can forget Sabeer Bhatia and the sale of Hotmail to Microsoft for $400 million?

AD: India has its own story too – in 1999, Satyam Infoway bought over IndiaWorld websites, owned by Rajesh Jain, for Rs 499 crore.

BC: Couldn’t you have done something useful in your teens? You could have become a millionaire...

AD: Guess my parents weren’t as understanding as Jason Citron’s folks were. When I should have been busy playing video games, they tried to get me to study…

BC: I don’t understand.

AD: Apparently, Jason was mad about Nintendo games from his childhood – he turned his childhood passion into a career by creating OpenFeint, a mobile platform for gaming.

BC: And it got bought over…

AD: …by GREE, a Japanese company, for $104 million… He became a millionaire at 26!

BC: I still can’t get over the big numbers…

AD: In that case, what would you say to YouTube’s $1.65 billion acquisition by Google? Or Skype’s sale to Microsoft for $8.5 billion?

BC: Whew! With a good idea, a billion dollars is just a click away!

AD: If a click’s worth a billion, imagine what a double click would be worth…

BC: Double that?

AD: DoubleClick, an online advertising company was bought over by Google for $3.1 billion – that’s double of what Google had paid for YouTube.

BC: Wow, these guys seem to mint money!

AD: You could too, if you had a venture like mint.com. Aaron Patzer started this money management site and sold it to Intuit for $170 million.

BC: Wonder how long it would take to make a million…

AD: Adam Cahan had started IntoNow, an app that gives you information about TV shows. In just three months, he sold the company to Yahoo! for close to $30 million.

BC: So technology does speed things up…

AD: Technology doesn’t need fancy degrees either - Jack Abraham, a school dropout, co-founded Milo – an online shopping site – and sold it to eBay for $75 million…

BC: From school dropout to $75 million in two years… I just don’t get it!

AD: Get what?

BC: I always thought great tech buys were about gadgets - who would have thought it would be about companies?