Читать книгу Investment Banking For Dummies - Matthew Krantz - Страница 47

It’s a classic American story. A young entrepreneur invents a technology in a garage or dorm room and knows he or she is onto something big. Some entrepreneurs, like Bill Gates of Microsoft, may stick with the idea and build and expand and create a giant publicly traded company.

Other entrepreneurs, though, know that building a company takes time and a string of not just one-hit products, but several, to fend off competition. Additionally, building a company requires the ability to tap many business skills, ranging from marketing to finance, not just research and development.

For that reason, it’s not uncommon for young fledging companies with a hot technology to simply sell themselves to bigger companies that already have an organization in place to put the technology to use right away. In deals like this, investment bankers are called in to put a price tag on the company and technology being bought.

Some of these private company sales can be significant bets. In May 2013, for instance, Internet firm Yahoo! bought a young website called Tumblr for $1 billion. Tumblr, a blogging platform used to share photos and other digital musings, was a private company founded by David Karp, who was a 19-year-old high-school dropout when the company started. Interestingly, Verizon bought Yahoo!, and shortly after, sold Tumblr. Just to show you how companies’ values can change, Tumblr reportedly sold for less than $3 million.