( Editor’s note: Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank is the author of Four Steps to the Epiphany . This column originally appeared on his blog .) It is a rare company that realizes it’s time to fire the CEO when the financials are good but the business is fundamentally heading for a cliff. For me, I learned this lesson first hand. I had joined the board of a $200 million public company that 15 years earlier had single-handily created an industry. The company had innovated, found a business model and grown successfully. But now, even as revenues continued to grow, the company was dying – slowly, but surely. There’s nothing harder than making radical changes when the numbers look great.
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Your company could be dying without anyone realizing it
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Playdom continued its buying spree as it announced today it is acquiring social game developer Merscom for an undisclosed price. Merscom is based in Chapel Hill, N.C., and it makes games for big brands such as Sea World, Purina, National Geographic and NBC Universal. Playdom, a big player in social games on both MySpace and Facebook, plans to leverage Merscom’s expertise in working with brand owners. And it will try to recruit more game veterans in the North Carolina game development community.
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Playdom buys game developer Merscom to cash in on brand-based games
Facebook bought Y Combinator startup Divvyshot to beef up its photo-sharing offerings for a combination of cash and equity. The company was raising angel funding when the social network approached the three-person startup with a sweeter valuation.
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Facebook acquires Divvyshot to beef up photos team
Gmail creator, FriendFeed co-founder and now Facebook employee Paul Buchheit has not only has had a stellar career as an entrepreneur and engineer. He’s also proving to be a savvy angel investor with four acquisitions of his portfolio companies in six months. Yesterday’s acquisition of mobile e-mail startup reMail by Google marked yet another home run for Buchheit, who came up with the search giant’s “Don’t be evil” slogan. He was also an early investor in both Appjet, which was also acquired by Google in December, and Mint, which was bought by Intuit for $170 million in September. Then, of course, Buchheit’s own company FriendFeed was bought by Facebook in a talent acquisition in August. Mint founder Aaron Patzer credited Buchheit with helping him think about the appropriate software architecture for his consumer finance site.
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Buchheit’s lucky streak as an angel (and a founder)
