This is certainly a controversial category amongst entrepreneurs. A few people are very passionate about creating long lasting companies, generating gobbles of cash and never sell it. However, it’s undeniable one of the most powerful allures of entrepreneurship is to strike big. That big strike comes in the form of an IPO or an Acquisition by a bigger company, and that’s called an “exit” in the startup industry. Positive exits can significantly impact the life of the founders and in some cases the employees of a startup, and provides the returns to investors (VCs and Angels) that keep them into the game and feeding this industry with capital when necessary.
This year, Seattle had a fairly good number of very positive exits. These are the five finalists on the Best Startup Acquisition. Read more about them below, register to attend the event, but also register to be a member of the Voting Panel and vote on your favorites.
Gist provides full view of the contacts in your professional network by creating rich business profiles that include the most news, status updates and work details. Gist was founded by T.A. McCann, raised $10.8 million from Vulcan Capital and Foundry Group and it was acquired in February 2011 by Research-In-Motion.
Jambool operates Social Gold™, a virtual monetization platform that enables developers to create and manage their own white-labeled virtual currency, to provide a in-app payments experience to their users, and to optimize their virtual economy using analytics. Jambool was founded by Vikas Gupta and Reza Hussein in 2006; they raised $6 million from Charles River Ventures, Madrona Venture Group and others, and they were acquired by Google in August of 2010 for $70 million.
Picnik is an online photo editor that gives users fast, easy access to powerful photo editing tools from any computer platform on any Internet browser. Picnik was founded by Mike Harrington, Darrin Massena and Jonathan Sposato, and it was acquired by Google in March of 2010.
Precision Polling offers automated phone surveys and polls to assist in research for political campaigns, non-profits, and conferences. The service allows users to create their own survey, add personalized audio, upload a specific phone list, run the survey in a designated time period, and generate detailed results with charts and analysis. They were founded by Gaurav Oberoi and Chuck Groom and the company was acquired by SurveyMonkey in June of 2010.
WhatCounts provides email newsletter management. It was founded by David Geller and Brian Ratzliff and they were acquired by Mansell Group in Dec/2010
Kate Mara Izabella Scorupco Carla Campbell Penélope Cruz Kristen Bell
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