Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Same Story, Ten Years Later?

Some historical parallelism struck me this morning as I was thinking about yesterday's acquisition of Maven Networks by Yahoo, for $160 million.

Almost ten years ago, Maven founder and CEO Hilmi Ozguc sold an earlier company, Narrative Communications, to @home Corp. Narrative harnessed new technologies, like animated and interactive banners, to make ads more compelling; Maven focuses on delivering video, and integrating advertising into it.

The purchase price of Narrative was $89 million (in stock).

Around that time, the Web portal Excite was in play, and the two suitors were Yahoo and @home. (Running Excite at the time was George Bell, now a partner with General Catalyst, the Cambridge venture capital firm that originally backed Maven.) @home, which had just bought Narrative, prevailed, and the merger took place in early 1999. It's now widely considered one of the worst combinations of the dot-com era. The newly-renamed Excite@Home saw its stock plummet, and declared bankruptcy in October 2001.

Kind of interesting, don't you think, that the latest acquirer of a Hilmi Ozguc start-up, Yahoo, is also in the thick of some merger discussions of it's own...

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