How I Sold This
By JJ Oslund
How I Sold ThisNov 07, 2019
The Joyable Acquisition with Peter Shalek
Peter Shalek was the co-founder and CEO of Joyable, a leading digital behavioral health company that raised $15m before being acquired by AbleTo in 2019. Before Joyable, Pete invested in and advised health tech companies. Pete graduated from Columbia with a bachelors in Mathematics and earned his MBA from Stanford. He now leads AbleTo's product strategy and development.
Sony M&A and Investments with Joseph Tou
Joseph Tou is Vice President, Corporate Development at Sony Corporation of America and Managing Director of Sony Innovation Fund where he primarily leads U.S. technology M&A and investment activity as well as venture investments. Prior to Sony, Joe was a senior investment professional at Bertram Capital and Mavent Partners and semiconductor equity research analyst at Pacific Crest Securities. Joe is heavily influenced by his technology development and operational roots at companies such as Intel, Solectron, and Ford. Joe holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and M.S. in operations research from Northwestern University. He also received a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan.
The Paribus Acquisition with Karim Atiyeh
Karim Atiyeh shares the story behind selling Paribus to Capital One after two years of rapid growth, going through YCombinator, and raising from top Silicon Valley VCs, including General Catalyst and Greylock.
TechCrunch Story: https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/06/capital-one-acquires-online-price-tracker-paribus/
You can follow Karim on Twitter: @karimatiyeh
The Panacast Acquisition with Aurangzeb Khan
In early 2019, Jabra/GN Group announced its $125M acquisition of Altia Systems, an AI conferencing camera for huddle rooms. In this episode, we talk with Altia System's co-founder and CEO, Aurangzeb Khan.
He helped grow Altia Systems’ unique PanaCast multi-camera array real-time, immersive intelligent vision system products to serve more than 1,600 companies, including 200+ universities, around the world. PanaCast is a platform that enables people and systems (machines) to see and make sense of their environment in real-time. PanaCast enables modern video collaboration, edge AI data and information, education, machine learning, AR/VR content creation, professional broadcasting, and autonomous vehicle capabilities.
Earlier, Aurangzeb was President & CEO at Everspin Technologies (NASD: MRAM; $100M IPO). He was co-founder, President & CEO at Altius Solutions and, immediately following the merger Simplex Solutions, contributed to the IPO in May 2001 (NASD: SPLX; $300M).
For more about Jabra Panacast: https://www.jabra.com/business/video-conferencing/jabra-panacast
The Cue Acquisition with Daniel Gross
In this episode, we dive into the acquisition of Cue by Apple (a reported $40M+ deal). Daniel Gross joins us to share his experiences building the company, the equity of opportunity, and his new venture: Pioneer. (https://pioneer.app)
Daniel Gross (@danielgross) is an entrepreneur and investor, born in Israel. When he was 18, he was accepted into Y-Combinator, being the youngest founder to ever be accepted into the accelerator at the time. He founded a company called Cue, an AI-powered search engine. Cue raised multiple rounds of financing from Sequoia Capital, Index and others.
In 2013, Cue was acquired by Apple. At 22, Daniel was leading several search and AI efforts across the company spanning iOS, OS X and Apple Watch. Daniel is also an investor in Github, Coinbase, Cruise, Gusto, Embark and others.
In 2017, Daniel joined Y-Combinator as a Partner. He launched YC AI, Y-Combinator’s first vertical dedicated to investing in AI companies.
Daniel is also the co-founder of AI Grant (aigrant.org), a distributed AI research lab that has funded 50 researchers around the globe.
In 2018, Daniel founded Pioneer (https://pioneer.app). Pioneer is a search engine for the millions of “Lost Einsteins” — extraordinarily creative people around the world who have the talent, but lack opportunity. Once identified, Pioneer makes small investments to support whatever project they’re working on.
The Dyn Acquisition with Kyle York
In November 2016, Oracle announced that it would acquire Dyn, the leading cloud-based Internet Performance and DNS provider. It's estimated that Oracle paid somewhere between $600 million and $700 million in the acquisition. Dyn monitors, controls, and optimizes Internet applications and cloud services to deliver faster access, reduced page load times, and higher end-user satisfaction.
In this episode, we speak with Kyle York, Chief Strategy Officer for Dyn at the time of the acquisition. Kyle York is now co-founder and CEO at York IE where he sets the company’s vision of building a hybrid strategic advisory, investment and operational growth firm. Kyle works closely with entrepreneurs and investors to help them realize their shared ambition to build good companies, create new jobs, grow generational wealth and impact the world.
You can learn more about Kyle's work and York IE at https://york.ie/
Welcome To How I Sold This
The ‘How I Sold This’ podcast takes you inside the world of startup acquisitions and liquidations, featuring the stories told from entrepreneurs who founded, built and exited their startup. We dive into the strategies that led to both success and failure at exit, and the practical insights that these founders have learned in the process.
We launch on October 29th! Stay tuned :)