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Day: May 27, 2021

Amazon’s Most Notable Acquisitions to Date

by Carmen Ang
This post is by Carmen Ang from Visual Capitalist

Most Notable Acquisitions by Amazon

The Briefing

  • Amazon plans to acquire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) for $8.45 billion
  • This move would add 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows to Amazon Studios’ content library

Amazon’s Most Notable Acquisitions To Date

Big Tech just keeps getting bigger.

On May 26, 2021, Amazon announced its plan to acquire Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studios for $8.45 billion, making it the company’s second largest acquisition to date.

Amazon has acquired multiple companies across a variety of sectors from healthcare to entertainment, helping diversify its core revenue. In total, the tech giant has acquired or invested in over 128 different companies over the last 20 years.

Top 10 Amazon Acquisitions by Value

In 2017, Amazon paid $13.7 billion to purchase Whole Foods Market—this remains the company’s largest acquisition to date.

The Whole Foods acquisition provided brick-and-mortar space for Amazon to sell some of its flagship devices, like the Echo Dot. It also allowed Amazon to gather valuable shopping data on its customers, to better understand their offline shopping preferences.

Here’s how Amazon’s top 10 acquisitions by value stack up in comparison:

RankCompany AcquiredAnnounced DateAcquisition Value
#1Whole Foods MarketJun 16, 2017$13,700,000,000
#2Metro-Goldwyn-MayerMay 26, 2021$8,450,000,000
#3ZooxJun 26, 2020$1,200,000,000
#4ZapposJul 22, 2009$1,200,000,000
#5RingFeb 27, 2018$970,000,000
#6PillPackJun 28, 2018$839,000,000
#7TwitchAug 25, 2014$775,000,000
#8Kiva SystemsMar 19, 2012$753,000,000
#9SouqMar 27, 2017$580,000,000
#10QuidsiNov 8, 2010$545,000,000

Prior to (Read more...)

Building a Successful SDR Team — Top Tips

by Niamh Barry
This post is by Niamh Barry from Georgian

Sales development is essential to an efficient revenue organization. We spoke to sales leaders to understand the core components of a successfully functioning SDR team. Here are our top takeaways from those conversations. 

1. Sales and Marketing – Aligned to Achieve

The importance of aligning your sales and marketing teams cannot be overstated. The leaders of these two departments are constantly executing campaigns that need to tie together and when they’re working in lockstep the sales development team works most efficiently.

To get in sync, it helps to focus both teams on the same target. More often than not, this will be on growing revenue. Start with a revenue target and work backwards to create more granular goals – i.e. how much pipeline do you need to cover that? How many SDR first meetings? How many MQLs to deliver those BDR meetings? And so on.

Once you have your goals laid out, the next item to agree on is the lead scoring methodology. Where this becomes especially important is the hand-off of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) from marketing to the SDR team. Your SDRs’ success is based on how crisp your MQL definition is and how your organization mobilizes around it.

Leads are typically scored in two ways:

  1. Fit: How well the lead matches your ideal customer profile 
  2. Engagement: The level of interaction with your content

Those two scores combined determine which leads pass to the sales development team as leads. 

The cost of prematurely calling a lead is usually (Read more...)

How to Do Long Term

by Collaborative Fund

Long-term thinking is easier to believe in than accomplish.

Most people know it’s the right strategy in investing, careers, relationships – anything that compounds. But saying “I’m in it for the long run” is a bit like standing at the base of Mt. Everest, pointing to the top, and saying, “That’s where I’m heading.” Well, that’s nice. Now comes the test.

Long term is harder than most people imagine, which is why it’s more lucrative than many people assume. Everything worthwhile has a price, and the prices aren’t always obvious. The real price of long term – the skills required, the mentality needed – is easy to minimize, often summarized with simple phrases like “be more patient,” as if that explains why so many people can’t.

To do long term effectively you have to come to terms with a few points.

1. The long run is just a collection of short runs you have to put up with.

Saying you have a 10-year time horizon doesn’t exempt you from all the nonsense that happens during the next 10 years. Everyone has to experience the recessions, the bear markets, the meltdowns, the surprises and the memes at the same time.

So rather than assuming long-term thinkers don’t have to deal with nonsense, the question becomes how can you endure a neverending parade of nonsense.

Long-term thinking can be a deceptive safety blanket that people assume lets them bypass the painful and unpredictable short run. But it never does. It might (Read more...)

Growth and Momentum in Indiana’s Startup Ecosystem

by Devin Miller

NVCA’s ‘Spotlight On’ series highlights VC ecosystems across the country. Our second program featured Indianapolis. Chris LaMothe, Chief Executive Officer at Indiana-based VC firm Elevate Ventures, shares his perspective on the evolution of Indiana’s startup scene and why the region is poised for growth.

Q&A with Chris LaMothe of Elevate Ventures

Can you tell us about your background in the Indiana startup ecosystem? What were your first interactions like?

My first engagement with the startup ecosystem was when I was running the Indiana Chamber of Commerce. I began to encourage state policy toward building an entrepreneurial ecosystem in our state. Eventually that work generated the formation of the 21 Fund, which was an investment vehicle investing in startup and early-stage companies in Indiana. I participated at the early stages of the public policy development around entrepreneurism and innovation in our state back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.

After 10 years of being CEO of the Chamber I left to run a wealth management company that invested client assets in a broad range of investments including private equity. I served on the boards of those and other companies and helped in developing and encouraging their growth. That was really the first direct engagement with the ecosystem.

I then left that organization and formed my own private equity company that began investing directly in entrepreneurial startups and existing companies around the Midwest. I ran, grew, and sold several companies over the course of 15 to 20 years. Around (Read more...)

Ranked: The World’s 25 Richest Millennial Billionaires

by Avery Koop
This post is by Avery Koop from Visual Capitalist

millennial billionaires

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Ranked: The World’s 25 Richest Millennial Billionaires

There are 2,755 billionaires globally—and combined, they are worth over $13 trillion.

Of these ultra wealthy individuals, just over 100 are millennials, born between the years 1981 and 1996. This young generation represents around 3.8% of all billionaires on a global basis with a combined net worth of $573.1 billion.

This visualization, using data from Forbes, ranks the richest 25 millennial billionaires and details their source of wealth, total net worth, nationality, and age.

Note: Forbes categorized billionaires by current age (2021). For those slightly over or under the age range of Millennials, meaning those who are currently 24 or 40 years old (i.e. they could have been born in either 1996/1997 or 1980/1981), if their birth year could not be accurately determined, they were left out of this ranking.

Who are the Millennial Billionaires?

The oldest millennials will be turning 40 in 2021, while the youngest are just turning 25. This means that millennial billionaires are generally the youngest billionaires in the world, save two (Read more...)

Key Founder Considerations When Starting a Company

by Jaclyn Robinson

This article is part of the Crunchbase Community Contributor Series. The author is an expert in their field and a Crunchbase user. We are honored to feature and promote their contribution on the Crunchbase blog.

Please note that the author is not employed by Crunchbase and the opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect official views or opinions of Crunchbase, Inc. 

Founding a company is a high-risk, high-reward investment for entrepreneurs. Excitement aside, whether you are a first-time founder or a seasoned veteran, there are a handful of “legal” items that you should consider as you ramp up. This post summarizes a few of these key items.

 

Initial founder(s) & equity allocation

Each company will have one or more founders. A baseline question that every founder or founding team must answer is whether the equity allocation amongst founders is split evenly (e.g., 50/50) or allocated unproportionally (e.g., 70/30). All factors should be considered here, but a key metric to think through is the amount of “time” that each founder will dedicate to a company.

It is no secret that founders are often not able to dedicate 100% of their time to a new startup, so attention should be given to that. By way of example, if a company has two founders, with one founder dedicating 100% of their time to the startup, and a second founder dedicating 50% of their time to the startup, perhaps an initial equity split is 70/30, rather than a (Read more...)

Key Founder Considerations When Starting a Company

by Jaclyn Robinson

This article is part of the Crunchbase Community Contributor Series. The author is an expert in their field and a Crunchbase user. We are honored to feature and promote their contribution on the Crunchbase blog.

Please note that the author is not employed by Crunchbase and the opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect official views or opinions of Crunchbase, Inc. 

Founding a company is a high-risk, high-reward investment for entrepreneurs. Excitement aside, whether you are a first-time founder or a seasoned veteran, there are a handful of “legal” items that you should consider as you ramp up. This post summarizes a few of these key items.

 

Initial founder(s) & equity allocation

Each company will have one or more founders. A baseline question that every founder or founding team must answer is whether the equity allocation amongst founders is split evenly (e.g., 50/50) or allocated unproportionally (e.g., 70/30). All factors should be considered here, but a key metric to think through is the amount of “time” that each founder will dedicate to a company.

It is no secret that founders are often not able to dedicate 100% of their time to a new startup, so attention should be given to that. By way of example, if a company has two founders, with one founder dedicating 100% of their time to the startup, and a second founder dedicating 50% of their time to the startup, perhaps an initial equity split is 70/30, rather than a (Read more...)