Initially, From The Hotmail.com to Ally.io - How startup acquisitions have evolved in two & half decades
The high school I attended was, at the time, just shy of being 150 years old. Its sheer age meant that over the years, despite its best efforts, it produced a number of celebrities. When I served my time there, the two biggest names were cricketer Dravid & Hotmail co-founder Sabeer Bhatia.
Consider that for a second. A thousand-odd rowdy boys, putting old indian team —a veritable God in a country where cricket is a religion—on the same pedestal as the founder of an email service.
The adulation was, perhaps, a function of the times. India's IT boom was still going strong, Bengaluru - Indian silicon city was its epicentre, and Bhatia—who had sold Hotmail to Microsoft for US$500 million a few years earlier—was viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement.
Some 25 years removed from Hotmail's acquisition, Microsoft made another acquisition—Ally.io.
The commonalities between Ally.io and Hotmail are uncanny. Both had an Indian founder, were domiciled in the US, and were scooped up by Microsoft for US$500 million.
Unlike Bhatia, however, Ally.io's founder, Vetri Vellore, has not become an overnight celebrity. Indeed, while Hotmail's acquisition made a global splash, the ripples from Ally.io's acquisition were only noticed by those who knew what they were looking for. A semi-corn in a world of unicorns, after all, is not quite so special.
It may be tempting to write Ally.io off as yet another footnote in startup history. However, as Mumbai Multimedia Studio points out in our today's article, the deal is both a marker of how far the startup ecosystem has come since Hotmail's acquisition, and has plenty of interesting insights for those willing to look beyond the headlines. For instance, why did Microsoft splurge half a billion dollars to buy a company with some 1,000 customers and an annual recurring revenue of less than US$10 million? #yusufbhandarkar #digitalmarketing2021 #seo www.multimediastudio.net
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