Peter Kafka

Recent Posts by Peter Kafka

Google's 2010 M&A Bill: $1.6 Billion and Counting

Lost track of Google’s M&A binge this year? No problem: The company helpfully tallies it up for investors in its most recent quarterly filing.

The big picture: Google has spent at least $1.6 billion buying 40 companies during the first nine months of 2010. And if you assume the previously announced ITA deal goes through this year, you can tack on another $700 million.

Google breaks out a few of the bigger deals:

Bear in mind that these numbers very likely underestimate Google’s real M&A cost, since they don’t include big employment contracts it hands out to keep key talent it picks up. Slide’s Max Levchin, for instance, is going to do very well as a Google engineer for at least a couple of years.


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The best and brightest are usually put to work on optimisation. … They will then go forward and solve the inefficiencies, and that’s where 99% of most energy is spent on. But, at some point you run out of room to improve things, and that’s when you have to step aside and ask, can we make it different?

— Horace Dediu, in a podcast interview with William Channer