Tag: business

Dell to by EMC for $67 billion

Bloomberg reports on a largest technology acquisition ever (excluding telephony):

Dell Inc. agreed to buy EMC Corp. for about $67 billion in the largest technology acquisition ever, creating a corporate-computing giant that will use a wider product lineup to woo customers as demand slows and competition stiffens.

Dell plans to pay $24.05 a share in cash plus tracking stock in EMC’s prize holding,VMware Inc., valued at about $9 for each EMC share, the companies said in a statement Monday. The price of $33.15 a share is 28 percent above EMC’s closing level on Oct. 7, just before reports surfaced that a deal was in the works.

Rogue Wave Software acquires Zend Technologies

zend rogue wave

Zend Technologies, the company behind PHP, has been acquired by Rogue Wave Software.  This sounds like huge news, except that I have no idea about who Rogue Wave Software are, what they do, and what’s their plan in regards to PHP.  Sure, the announcement suggests that they’ll help to push PHP technology into the enterprise.  But, I guess, that remains to be seen.

Congratulations and kudos to Zend Technologies for all the work they’ve done so far.

Startup Metrics

The $4 billion venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is sharing some of the startup metrics that they use (part 1, part 2).  Here they are just for the overview, follow through to the blog posts for details:

  1. Bookings vs. Revenue
  2. Recurring Revenue vs. Total Revenue
  3. Gross Profit
  4. Total Contract Value vs. Annual Contract Value
  5. Life Time Value
  6. Gross Merchandise Value vs. Revenue
  7. Unearned or Deferred Revenue and Billings
  8. Customer Acquisition Cost (Blended vs. Paid, Organic vs. Inorganic)
  9. Active Users
  10. Month-on-Month Growth
  11. Churn
  12. Burn Rate
  13. Downloads
  14. Cumulative Charts vs. Growth Metics
  15. Order of Operations
  16. Total Addressable Market
  17. Annual Recurring Revenue
  18. Average Revenue Per User
  19. Gross Margins
  20. Sell-Through Rate and Inventory Turns
  21. Network Effects
  22. Virality
  23. Economies of Scale
  24. Net Promoter Score
  25. Cohort Analysis
  26. Registered Users
  27. Sources of Traffic
  28. Customer Concentration Risk

There are also some tips and tricks on charts and data presentation, like truncating the Y-axis.  Here is an example:

truncating y-axis

Overall, quite a bit of useful information for analysis of different startups.  No wonder their portfolio is so impressive!

P.S.: Love the creative approach to the domain name as well … a16z.com (16 letters between A and Z in the company name Andreessen Horowitz, minus a space).

Billion dollar club

billion dollar club

The Wall Street Journal compiles a list of venture-back private companies, valued at $1 billion or more.  There’s a table with the list of 120+ companies and an interactive chart to navigate it.

Note: This chart only includes companies that are privately held, have raised money in the past four years and have at least one venture-capital firm as an investor. Excluded from this list are companies that were majority-controlled by an institutional investment firm at one point. Only valuations confirmed by VentureSource or The Journal are included, based on direct investments, not secondary deals.