United States · 10 profiles
The American exits, 1997 to 2021
Ten founders, eight sales and two Nasdaq listings. The buyers were nearly always bigger technology companies buying their way into a product they had not built themselves.
The oldest exit here is Hotmail, sold to Microsoft in 1997 for a figure of roughly $400 million that was widely reported and never officially confirmed. The newest is Bumble, which raised $2.2 billion on Nasdaq in February 2021. In between sit PayPal, VMware, Zappos, Omniture, Instagram, Twitch, Stitch Fix and AppDynamics.
Eight of the ten were bought rather than floated, and the buyer was usually a large incumbent: eBay took PayPal, EMC took VMware, Adobe took Omniture, Amazon took Zappos and then Twitch, Facebook took Instagram, Cisco took AppDynamics. AppDynamics never made it to the market at all. Cisco put $3.7 billion in cash and equity on the table one day before the IPO was due to price at a valuation under $2 billion, and the company took it.
Seven of these companies were built within an hour of San Francisco. The other three were not. Zappos ran from Henderson, Nevada, Omniture from Orem, Utah, and Bumble from Austin.
Every profile
The 10 American founders, one by one
Each profile carries the bio, how the deal came together, and links to the original reporting.
Max Levchin
PayPal
Mountain View, California
Kevin Systrom
San Francisco, California
Sabeer Bhatia
Hotmail
Sunnyvale, California
Tony Hsieh
Zappos
Henderson, Nevada
Jyoti Bansal
AppDynamics
San Francisco, California
Emmett Shear
Twitch
San Francisco, California
Katrina Lake
Stitch Fix
San Francisco, California
Josh James
Omniture
Orem, Utah
Whitney Wolfe Herd
Bumble
Austin, Texas
Diane Greene
VMware
Palo Alto, California