13 Startups Facebook Acqui-Hired For Millions Of Dollars

Since its first acquisition in 2007, Facebook has been buying startups left and right.

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It's not because Facebook wants the technology.  Most of the startups it buys are instantly shut down.

It's after the engineering talent, and Facebook will happily pay $500,000 to $1 million per engineer.

“We have never once bought a company for the company. We buy companies for excellent people,” Zuckerbeg said at Stanford's 20010 Startup School event.

In the past four years, Facebook has acquired 13 companies, and it's safe to assume they paid millions of dollars for each one.

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*Note: Pursuit and RecRec weren't actual business acquistions, so they were not included in this list, even though most of their teams were bought/hired by Facebook.

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Parakey was Facebook's first acquisition back in 2007

Blake ross
Blake Ross is cofounder of Parakey indieflikr via Flickr

Concept: A new way for people to work seamlessly on applications both on and offline

Founders: Blake Ross, Joe Hewitt (the creators of Mozilla Firefox browser)

Date acquired: July 19, 2007

Investors: Sequoia Capital, O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, MSD Capital, YCombinator, Thomvest, Paul Buchheit, Ron Conway and Warren Zide

Sold for: N/A

Source: VentureBeat

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Zuckerberg said Facebook "really wanted Bret," so it bought FriendFeed for $50 million

Facebook CTO Bret Taylor
Bret Taylor is now Facebook's CTO.

Concept: A feed that gives users a stream of news about what their friends are doing from 23 other networks like Digg, YouTube and Flickr.

Founders: Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail and the motto, Don't be evil), Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, Sanjeev Singh

Date acquired: August 10, 2009

Investors: Benchmark Capital

Sold for: About $50 million

Source: Paidcontent


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People heavily questioned Facebook's purchase of tiny, two-person Octazen, but speculated it was yet another talent acquisition.

octazon

Concept: A contact importer that enabled Facebook users to invite their friends to sign up.

Founders: Kenneth Foo (CEO) and cofounder

Date acquired: February 19, 2010

Sold for: N/A

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Divvyshot founder Sam Odio is now product manager of Facebook photos

Sam Odio of Facebook and Divvyshot
Divvyshot founder Sam Odio Sam Odio

Concept: Make group photo sharing easier

Founders: Sam Odio

Date acquired: March 2, 2010

Investors: Y-combinator backed

Sold for: The amount of the acquisition is not being disclosed, but TechCrunch says it was a talent acquisition and that the amount was "likely small."

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Facebook spokesman Larry Yu says Sharegrove was acquired mostly to obtain cofounder Adam Wolff

Gokul Rajaram
Adam Wolff cofounded Sharegrove Laszlonian via Flickr

Concept: A smaller social network that creates private groups for friends and families to share content.

Founders: Kent Libbey, Adam Wolff (only Wolff joined Facebook)

Date acquired: May 26, 2010

Investors: Elm Street Ventures

Sold for: N/A

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Facebook acquired Nextstop for $2.5 million only to immediately shut it down.

carl sjogreen
Carl Sjogreen cofounded Nextstop Twitter

Concept: Social travel recommendations that mixes gaming, search and social elements.

Founders: Charles Lin, Carl Sjogreen, Adrian Graham (Xooglers who created Google Calendar and Google Groups)

Date acquired: July 8, 2010

Investors: Sequoia Capital

Sold for: $2.5 million

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Facebook paid $10 million to acqui-hire the Chai Labs founders

Gokul Rajaram Chai Labs
Gokul Rajaram cofounded Chai Labs. Flickr

Concept: A content management system that uses algorithms to help publishers create interesting content.

Founders: Gokul Rajaram, Giri Rajaram

Date acquired: August 15, 2010

Investors: Joe Kraus (Google Ventures), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz) and Reid Hoffman (Greylock Partners/LinkedIn founder).

Sold for: $10 million

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Hot Potato was also bought by Facebook for $10 million and then shut down, all for cofounder Justin Shaffer

Justin Shaffer 400x300

Concept: Connects family and friends in real-time around live events

Founders: Saadiq Rodgers-King and Justin Shaffer

Date acquired: July 19, 2007

Investors: RRE Ventures, Ron Conway, Ken and Ben Leher, Josh and Jared Kuschner, Hunch's Chris Dixon, Facebook's Dave Morin and others.

Sold for: about $10 million

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Sam Lessin at Drop.io cost a lot of money for Facebook to buy: about $10 million

Sam Lessin, drop.io
Drop.io founder Sam Lessin was acqui-hired for $10 million.

Concept: Free filesharing pages

Founders: Sam Lessin

Date acquired: October 29, 2010

Investors: RRE Ventures and DFJ Gotham

Sold for: about $10 million

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Facebook acquired 9 of Rel8tion's employees when it acquired the company earlier this year.

peter wilson rel8tion
Peter Wilson cofounded Rel8tion

Concept: A hyper-local mobile advertising service

Founder: Peter Wilson and Scott Hannan

Date acquired: January 25, 2011

Sold for: N/A

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Beluga may have been Facebook's first people AND product acquisition. Only time will tell.

beluga
belugapods.com

Concept: Group text messaging service

Founders: Jonathan Perlow, Lucy Zhang, Ben Davenport

Date acquired: March 2, 2011

Sold for: N/A

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Facebook paid a whopping $60-70 million for mobile app startup Snaptu

snaptu

Concept: Turns your favorite websites into ultra fast mobile apps that work on your phone

Founders: Ran Makavy (CEO), Barak Naveh (CTO)

Date acquired: March 20, 2011

Investors: Carmel Ventures and Sequoia Capital

Sold for: $60-70 million (although some estimates are lower at $40 million)

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DayTum founders Nich Felton and Ryan Case were acqui-hired and joined Facebook's product design team last month

daytum

Concept: Tools to record personal data and create visualizations from it.

Founders: Nicholas Felton, Ryan Case

Date acquired: April 27, 2011

Sold for: N/A

Speaking of millions of dollars, check out:

ellen levy reid hoffman linkedin
Ellen Levy and Reid Hoffman both made millions (and billions) of dollars today. Ross Mayfield via Flickr

20 People Who Just Got Filthy Rich From The LinkedIn IPO >>

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