Blackstone has acquired Ancestry for $4.7 billion from a group of private equity investors (Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC, Permira, Silver Lake, Spectrum Equity)
Within eight years those private equity investors purchased Ancestry for $1.3 billion and have now sold for $4.7 billion. Not a bad return!
Ancestry currently has $1 billion in annual revenue from a base of more than 3 million customers who pay for its various family history services.
Waymo at present has a private valuation that is twice as high as Tesla.
How can this be?
Margins! Tesla is focused on the full production of the car where Waymo is focused purely on the underlying technology with self driving cars. Thus, Waymo will have a Gross Margin that is extremely high in comparison to Tesla.
Eric Schmidt talked about this a lot. How Google and its products always wanted to be focused on providing the technology sub stack instead of the full product as it keeps margins at a high level and thus maximising value.
Google is one of the world’s largest technology companies and at present the majority of its work force are contractors. Its reported that there are over 90,000 direct employees at Google.
Google’s Alphabet Inc. employs hordes of these red- and green-badged contract workers in addition to its full-fledged staff. They serve meals and clean offices. They write code, handle sales calls, recruit staff, screen YouTube videos, test self-driving cars and even manage entire teams – a sea of skilled laborers that fuel the $795 billion company but reap few of the benefits and opportunities available to direct employees.
Source: Fortune
Verizon recently announced their acquisition of BlueJeans and it was very well times as it was remote working was starting to explode around the world due to Coronavirus COVID-19.
BlueJeans has long been one of the favourite video conferencing applications for the enterprise, but it has never really catched on outside the large enterprise deals.
Is this an opportunity for Verizon to also create a consumer version on BlueJeans?
Apple will soon be showing all users where their closest COVID-19 Test location is in Apple Maps. There will be a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.
Apple has launched a portal for hospitals, healthcare providers and businesses to register as a COVID-19 testing location. Apple will review the application and when approved, the location will start appearing on Apple Maps.
The testing locations will appear with a red medical glyph icon, and a special banner in the Apple Maps card.
Microsoft buying Wunderlist seemed to fit nicely with the business productivity suite that Microsoft has developed over many year.
The Wunderlist acquisition was only $150 million and it sounds like a lot, but it is only 0.1% of Microsoft’s market capitalisation.
Wunderlist fits in nicely with Outlook and running tasks from within email – plus it can go nicely with Office 365 inside a suite of much larger products – it also might have been to hire the amazing talent at Wunderlist.
Tesla is a very interesting beast! It looks and feels like a car company, but really it’s not!
Here is a link to an interesting article about Tesla not being a hypergrowth company.
For the past month or so I have been thinking a lot about internal communications at our company and trying to work out how we can create a central source of truth and information for all the products we create. This lead me to Confluence.
Confluence is a tool that allows anyone to create a wiki (that actually looks good) in a matter of minutes.
Confluence looked like a great solution and I even had a play around with the product as its free to signup and use for 10 people. However, I was simply shocked at the price of such a tool. I understand internal communication is very important, but should it really be valued at $10 per user per month?
I know Confluence hosts the platform and there are a lot of great features, but $10 per user per month just seems a little bit over the top for a tool that I could create using WordPress in a matter of hours (which will have a hosting cost, but at a fraction of the cost).
Why are so many technology companies especially paying for such a service? Is it because of the ease of use? Is it because of the templates?
You can’t even brand Confluence effectively for your company on the $10 per user per month.