How Google Perfected the Silicon Valley Acquisition

15 minute read

Correction appended, April 21

In late October John Hanke and several of his co-workers met for a reunion of sorts at Fiesta Del Mar, a Mexican restaurant near Google’s Mountain View headquarters. Hanke, a 10-year Google employee who led initial development of Maps, was once the founder of a small geodata startup called Keyhole that Google acquired in 2004. The fact that the one-time entrepreneur has stayed with the search giant for more than a decade makes him and his colleagues oddities in Silicon Valley. “There are quite a large number of [us] who are still at Google, and I have to say I don’t think anyone expected that when we first came in,” he says.

Google has used acquisitions to expand its workforce and launch new products since before it was a household name. Recently that strategy has become the modus operandi for technology firms in Silicon Valley. Facebook is using its fast-growing cash hoard to take control over sectors both adjacent to its core product (WhatsApp for $22 billion) and far-flung from social networking (Oculus VR for $2 billion). Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are doing the same, making big-ticket bets by buying Minecraft developer Mojang ($2.5 billion), Tumblr ($1.1 billion) and video game streaming site Twitch ($970 million), respectively. Even Apple, which long eschewed splashy acquisitions in favor of much smaller, less public buys, says it bought at least 30 companies during the last fiscal year, including the $3 billion purchase of Beats.

Overall spending on tech acquisitions topped $170 billion in 2014, up 54% from the previous year and more than double the amount spent in 2010, according to PrivCo, a research firm that tracks investments in private businesses. As the core of dominant technology companies get larger, they have come to depend on acquisitions not only to broaden their businesses but also to sustain the pace of innovation. “Companies are buying innovation,” explains Peter Levine, a general partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. “As large companies need to be competitive and want to increase their footprints in a variety of different areas, one of the best ways to do that is through acquisition.”

The deals are a boon for startups as well. Venture capital is abundant, and companies can rely on investment rather than revenue to keep growing. If it’s not clear how a startup will eventually convert users into revenue, a buyout from a large firm can render that problem irrelevant—or at least less urgent. While investors and founders insist that launching a thriving self-supporting company is still the end-goal in Silicon Valley, “exiting” via a sale rather than an initial public offering can still net a lucrative payout. “It’s almost a goal for some of these companies as they start, to have that exit event,” says George Geis, a business professor at UCLA whose upcoming book, Semi-Organic Growth, analyzes Google’s acquisition strategy over the years.

But while snapping up a startup is now easy, holding onto its key employees is more difficult. Startup founders, who often think of themselves as entrepreneurs before engineers, are notoriously difficult to keep at large firms long. Partly, this is cultural: striking out on one’s own, idea in hand, is a fundamental part of the Silicon Valley ethos. The widespread availability of funding doesn’t hurt, either. That has left firms struggling to keep the expertise they may have spent millions acquiring. “When a firm is making a tech acquisition, they’re buying the talent as much as they’re buying the technology,” says Brian JM Quinn, a law professor specializing in mergers and acquisitions at Boston College.

A TIME analysis of startup founders’ LinkedIn profiles found that about two-thirds of the startup founders that accepted jobs at Google between 2006 and 2014 are still with the company. Amazon has retained about 55% of its founders over that time period, while Microsoft’s rate is below 45%. Facebook, with a 75% retention rate for founders, is beating its older competitors, but the company only began acquiring companies in significant numbers around 2010 or so. Yahoo and Apple, which have both gone on acquisition sprees under new CEOs Marissa Mayer and Tim Cook in the last two years, now have a similar retention rate to Google.

Google stands out among this cohort in large part because of the massive number of acquisitions it’s conducted. Overall at least 221 startup founders joined Google’s ranks between 2006 and 2014. Yahoo, the next closest competitor, added at least 110 founders to its employee roster in that time. Google’s internal calculation of its overall retention rate for startup founders through its history is similar to TIME’s, according to data provided by the company. Apple, Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft declined to share any information on the retention of founders; Amazon did not respond to a request for data.

An examination of the ways Google tries to retain employees provides a window into the increasingly ferocious battle among the tech sector’s giants to expand through conquest. “Google,” says Geis, “has done a pretty good job—among the best in Silicon Valley.”

The 10 Most Ambitious Google Projects

A driver drives a Google Inc. self-driving car in front of the company's headquarters in Mountain View, California on September 27, 2013.
Google Driverless Car The Google Self-Driving Car has been in the works since 2005 after a team of engineers won a grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to design an autonomous car. The project, which aims to reduce traffic accidents, has made headway in recent years as states passed laws permitting self-driving cars. Google plans a commercial release between 2017 and 2020.David Paul Morris—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Google Internet Balloon
Google has been testing balloons which sail into the stratosphere and beam Internet down to Earth. Jon Shenk—AP
This undated photo released by Google shows a contact lens Google is testing to explore tear glucose.
Google's smart contact lenses.Google/AP
Avatars from Google Lively.
Google Lively Google Lively was a web-based virtual community space where users could design avatars, chat with one another and personalize their online hangout space. The project was discontinued after a six-month stint in 2008 after limited success.Google/AP
Eye in the Sky
Google Earth Google's virtual map of the Earth allows users to tour the earth with 3-D satellite images. The project, which dates back to 2004, has already found significant applications in disaster relief.Google/AP
Google's modular phone (Project Ara) at Engadget Expand New York 2014 at Javits Center on Nov. 7, 2014 in New York City.
Project Ara Google's build-your-own-smartphone project allows users to customize their handsets to their own preferences, with the possibility of eliminating electronic waste by encouraging users to add hardware updates on their own terms. The team is working towards a limited market pilot in 2015.Bryan Bedder—Getty Images for Engadget Expand
colored pill capsules
Disease Detecting Pill Google unveiled its plans to disease-detecting ingestible pill in October, a project that'll let patients access their real-time health data to encourage preventative care. The pill will contain nanoparticles that can bind to certain cells and chemicals, with the possibility of detecting diseases like cancer in early stages.Getty Images
Flight team engineers Kenneth Jensen, left, Damon Vander Lind, center, and Matthew Peddie prepare for the first crosswind test of their 20kW Wing 7 airborne wind turbine prototype in Alameda, Calif. on May 24, 2011
Flying Wind Turbines The flying windmill is the project of Makani Power, a wind turbine developer acquired by Google in 2013. The tethered airborne turbines will harness wind energy for the goal of producing low-cost, renewable energyAndrea Dunlap—Makani Power/AP
Vic Gundotra, director of product management of Google, demonstrates Google+ on the Nexus 7 tablet during Google I/O 2012 at Moscone Center in San Francisco on June 27, 2012.
Google+ Google's social networking platform launched in 2011, the most successful service after several flops at designing a Facebook competitor, like the now-retired Google Buzz. Today, Google+ boasts over half a billion monthly active users.Stephen Lam—Reuters
Books
Google Books Google Books dates back to 2004, when Google partnered with libraries and universities to plan to digitize millions of volumes over the next several years. The project aims to make searching books as easy as searching the web.Getty Images

‘The toothbrush test’

Even when Google was small, it wasn’t shy about spending. The company’s first startup acquisition, the 2003 purchase of Pyra Labs, forms the backbone of what is today Blogger, an online publishing platform. Since then, many of Google’s most well-known products, including Android, YouTube, Maps, Docs and Analytics, have originated from acquisitions. “M&A has obviously been a huge part of Google—and, I think, Google’s success—for a long time,” says Don Harrison, Google’s vice president for corporate development, who oversees the company’s acquisitions.

Before any deal is finalized, it has to pass what CEO Larry Page calls “the toothbrush test”: is the product something you use daily and would make your life better? “If anything matches the toothbrush test and relates to technology, then Larry has an interest in it,” explains Harrison.

Typically, Google buys occur in sectors where the company has already been experimenting itself. Harrison points to YouTube as a prime example. Google already had a video sharing service called Google Video in the mid-2000’s, but YouTube’s fast-growing user base convinced the firm to offer a then-eye-popping $1.65 billion for the startup, even though it was barely a year old and earned no revenue. Today, YouTube brings in billions of dollars of revenue per year and is the third most-visited website in the world, according to Web analytics firm Alexa.

But the return on investment on an acquisition isn’t only measured monetarily. It’s important to Google and other tech giants that the founders behind ideas worth paying for stick around as well. Harrison says founder retention is one of the significant factors Google measures as part of the “scorecarding” it does to evaluate its purchases. “We hold ourselves accountable to make sure that the founders are able to be successful within Google,” Harrison says. “It’s something that we’re not only working on at the time we buy the company but we work on for years after as well.”

Cash alone can’t convince the top startup founders to join Google. 2014 was the most active year for IPOs in the U.S. since the year 2000, according to IPO tracker Renaissance Capital, and Chinese online retailer Alibaba had the biggest public debut in world history, raising $25 billion in September. “As aggressive as we’re willing to be, we probably can’t match public company premiums right now,” Harrison admits.

So Google tries to find other ways to lure key talent.

‘A True CEO’

For Tony Fadell, the CEO of smart home company Nest, the decision of whether or not be acquired by Google was really a question of how he wanted to spend his time.

Google had begun courting Nest almost from the company’s inception, ever since Fadell showed Google founder Sergey Brin a prototype of the Nest Thermostat at a TED conference in 2011. At the time, Fadell wasn’t interested in a buyout. “I wanted to keep it as a startup as long as possible,” he says.

But as Nest grew, so did Fadell’s logistical headaches. By 2013, he says he was spending 90% of his time on what he calls “back-of-house stuff”: managing finances, talking to investors, wrestling with taxes and fending off patent lawsuits. “There was a lot of selling to multiple entities that we were doing the right thing,” he says.

When Google came knocking again, offering a big payday and the chance to keep Nest’s name brand intact—a key requirement for Fadell—an acquisition seemed more appealing. Now Fadell says he spends 95% of his time focused on product development and key relationships. Nest, meanwhile, has gotten access to resources that would have taken much longer to accrue independently. The company launched in five new countries in 2014, but Fadell thinks they would have only reached two without Google’s help.

In many ways, the Nest acquisition is the ideal scenario startup founders envision when they agree to be swallowed by a larger company. Harrison, Google’s M&A head, calls Fadell a “true CEO” and says Google execs serve more as a board of directors for Nest instead of supervisors. Fadell says he hasn’t had to get formal approval for anything from Google, though he reports directly to Larry Page and meets with the Google CEO a few times per month. “He’s like, ‘Call me when you need me, but this is for you to run,’” Fadell says of his relationship with Page. “He gives us the freedom, so I run with that. Only when it’s really major decisions do I really touch base with him.”

Some founders who don’t quite have Fadell’s free rein are still granted a certain level of autonomy. Skybox Imaging, a satellite manufacturer that Google acquired for $500 million last summer, reports to the company’s vice president of engineering for geo products but maintains separate offices from Google in Mountain View. “We kind of get a little bit of the best of both worlds,” says Ching-Yu Hu, one of the four Skybox founders that now works at Google. “We’re all Googlers now so we have access to all the infrastructure there, but at the same time we’re semi-autonomous.”

The company has experimented with more direct incentives to maintain an entrepreneurial spirit. For a few years in the mid-2000’s Google handed out Founders Awards valued at as much as $12 million in stock to teams that developed successful new products like Gmail and Google Maps. Today awards are a little less explicit, in the form of more traditional of raises or promotions. Google works closely with founders in their first 90 days on the job to insure they’re getting acclimated well, but check-ins on founders’ progress can continue for years, depending on the acquisition.

At the core of Google’s pitch to founders is the opportunity for bountiful resources. Sure, those can be scratched and clawed for independently, but going it alone requires a lot more time, money and luck than hitching your wagon to one of the richest companies on Earth. “It was a pretty compelling pitch,” Hanke recalls of his own deliberations about whether to sell Keyhole to Google. “We could achieve a lot more standing on the shoulders of all that was going on at Google versus trying to do it on our own as startup.”

Google's New Headquarters Looks Like a Giant Glass Forest

This rendering shows a restored natural habitat around Permanente Creek, near the proposed Landings project. You can’t tell, but a consolidated parking structure is hidden below this landscaped garden. By consolidating parking, traffic congestion is reduced in the area, making it safer and more attractive for people to walk and bike.
This rendering shows a restored natural habitat around Permanente Creek, near the proposed Landings project. You can’t tell, but a consolidated parking structure is hidden below this landscaped garden. By consolidating parking, traffic congestion is reduced in the area, making it safer and more attractive for people to walk and bike.dbox/Google
This rendering shows the entry lobby of the proposed Landings building. Consolidated parking sits below the building, helping us reach our goal of Net-Zero parking. Once at Landings, visitors can easily connect to the rest of campus through one of several walking and biking paths.
This rendering shows the entry lobby of the proposed Landings building. Consolidated parking sits below the building, helping us reach our goal of Net-Zero parking. Once at Landings, visitors can easily connect to the rest of campus through one of several walking and biking paths.dbox/Google
This rendering shows the west side of the proposed Shoreline building. The canopies along Shoreline Boulevard open onto a public plaza with retail spaces. Along the street, buildings are 2 or 3 stories, with taller areas toward the center of the structures.
This rendering shows the west side of the proposed Shoreline building. The canopies along Shoreline Boulevard open onto a public plaza with retail spaces. Along the street, buildings are 2 or 3 stories, with taller areas toward the center of the structures. dbox/Google
This bird’s eye view shows Google’s proposed new campus and its surroundings.
This bird’s eye view shows Google’s proposed new campus and its surroundings.dbox/Google
The building’s translucent canopy lifts up to allow the public Green Loop to go through the center of the building, with cafes and local shops on the lower levels.
In this rendering, Huff Avenue is transformed into a soft grid for pedestrians and bikes. The building’s translucent canopy lifts up to allow the public Green Loop to go through the center of the building, with cafes and local shops on the lower levels. dbox/Google
Mountain View’s Precise Plan encourages the creation of a diverse network of public and private open spaces such as plazas, parks and trails. This rendering shows the Green Loop, a circuit for bikes and pedestrians that weaves through urban and natural areas. A solar canopy produces energy and also protects bicyclists from the rain.
Mountain View’s Precise Plan encourages the creation of a diverse network of public and private open spaces such as plazas, parks and trails. This rendering shows the Green Loop, a circuit for bikes and pedestrians that weaves through urban and natural areas. A solar canopy produces energy and also protects bicyclists from the rain.dbox/Google
This rendering shows the inside of the proposed Charleston South building looking west. Within the canopy, building segments operate like furniture—light, tactile and reconfigurable. These segments form small villages where employees can work or relax. The Green Loop goes through the building. The rim of the canopy provides structure as well as biking and walking paths.
This rendering shows the inside of the proposed Charleston South building looking west. Within the canopy, building segments operate like furniture—light, tactile and reconfigurable. These segments form small villages where employees can work or relax. The Green Loop goes through the building. The rim of the canopy provides structure as well as biking and walking paths.dbox/Google
This rendering shows the west side of the proposed Huff project. At ground level, the environment is newly restored. Employees will be drawn from offices to the outdoors, to work alongside waterways and under trees. Mountain View residents can walk or ride along green corridors, eat at cafes, shop, play in parks, or work in the public community gardens.
This rendering shows the west side of the proposed Huff project. At ground level, the environment is newly restored. Employees will be drawn from offices to the outdoors, to work alongside waterways and under trees. Mountain View residents can walk or ride along green corridors, eat at cafes, shop, play in parks, or work in the public community gardens. dbox/Google
Large, translucent enclosures blur the boundaries between inside and out. These canopies regulate climate, pollution, and sound, while freeing spaces from traditional architectural limitations like walls, windows and roofs.
This rendering shows the northwest corner of the proposed Charleston South building. Large, translucent enclosures blur the boundaries between inside and out. These canopies regulate climate, pollution, and sound, while freeing spaces from traditional architectural limitations like walls, windows and roofs. Cafes and local shops on the lower levels open into interior open walkways under the canopy.dbox/Google
This rendering shows the northern half of the proposed Landings project. In place of parking lots and other underutilized sites, we will establish revitalized native ecosystems, including re-oaking and wetlands.
This rendering shows the northern half of the proposed Landings project. In place of parking lots and other underutilized sites, we will establish revitalized native ecosystems, including re-oaking and wetlands.dbox/Google

When Founders Leave

Still, even Harrison admits that not every acquisition goes smoothly. Because California is an at-will employment state, workers can generally be fired or choose to leave at any time. Tech companies try to ensure founders stick around for a while by offering a stay bonus or using “golden handcuffs,” which often meter out the payday for a big acquisition in company shares that vest over several years. Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp, for instance, includes $3 billion in restricted stock for WhatsApp employees, but they can’t fully tap into those funds unless they stay at the company for four years.

In some cases, golden handcuffs aren’t enough to keep founders on board. Kosta Eleftheriou joined Google in October 2010 through the acquisition of his keyboard app BlindType, but life at the massive company wasn’t what he envisioned. Eleftheriou says he was relegated to maintaining Google’s stock Android keyboard rather than envisioning ways to improve the product. He left after one month, leaving half of his compensation package for the acquisition on the table (he says the total acquisition price was in the seven figures). Now he’s a founder again, with a new keyboard app called Fleksy that has been downloaded 4 million times.

“It was a mismatch between what I was expecting and what happened,” Eleftheriou says. “I think that was partly due to maybe some unrealistic expectations on my side on how much creative freedom I would have. I was hoping to be part of a bigger picture than just some engineer working on something by themselves.”

As the founder of a small company that didn’t make huge headlines when it was acquired, Eleftheriou’s experience isn’t uncommon in the Valley. “Unless they’re sufficiently large, very few acquisitions continue to run independently,” says Justin Kan, a partner at the venture capital firm Y Combinator and cofounder of Twitch. “Oftentimes founders are rolled up inside another group inside of the company. They can’t make decisions as freely as when they were entrepreneurs. That affects people’s willingness to stick around.”

Sometimes founders simply crave the excitement of starting something new. Uri Levine was the only one of Waze’s three founders who chose not to join Google when the traffic app was acquired for $1 billion in June 2013. Instead he launched a new startup—his sixth—called FeeX, which aims to help people reduce investment fees in their retirement accounts. “Entrepreneurs, they are driven by a passion for change,” Levine says. “As soon as you become part of a large organization, you cannot change anymore.”

Google’s also had some more high-profile misfires. When it made its largest acquisition ever, the $12.5 billion purchase of handset maker Motorola Mobility, Page hailed it as an opportunity to “supercharge the Android ecosystem.” But Motorola’s phones failed to gain traction, the subsidiary racked up $1.4 billion in losses for Google, and the company offloaded the handset division to Lenovo for $2.9 billion in 2014. Harrison defends the deal as a smart acquisition because of the patent portfolio that Google acquired, helping the company defend itself from lawsuits by Apple and Microsoft (Geis, who has studied the transaction closely, called it “a wash” for Google).

The Spree Continues

At Google, at least, there are opportunities for change for some founders who join the company. Hanke, the former Keyhole CEO, spent several years heading up Google’s geo services, but now he’s in charge of Niantic Labs, a separately branded unit that Google bills as an “internal startup.” Hanke’s team develops apps that increase the opportunity for digital interaction in real-world environments, like InGress, a mobile game that requires players to visit physical locations to gain power ups. Android founder Andy Rubin also took on a role far removed from smartphones when he became the head of Google’s robotics division in 2013. (Rubin eventually left Google in October after nine years at the company).

Google is constantly making these kinds of bets on the future, and it needs new blood with fresh ideas to sustain them. The company is currently wrestling with multiple threats to its core business, search, including a declining share of desktop searches and a mobile market where Amazon is stealing product search queries and Facebook is taking ad dollars. If Google is to maintain its steady growth, it will eventually have to tap into a new revenue source somewhere, and that may well stem from an acquisition. The company may view Nest as the key purchase that ensures its future dominance, given Fadell’s perch. “Founders and everyone else at these startups, they want to be businesspeople,” he explains.

And the big businesses themselves? They want to ensure they don’t miss out on the next big thing. “The ability to move quickly in rapidly changing markets is one of the major drivers,” says Geis of the acquisition spree. “If you want to effectively compete and innovate continually, it can’t all be from within.”

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Correction: The original version of this story incorrectly described George Geis. He is a business professor at UCLA.

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