One of the largest exits of a venture-backed company based on the East Coast was when Right Media sold to Yahoo for $850 million in 2007. In this episode of Founder Stories, Mike Walrath tells host Chris Dixon how Right Media got started in the middle of the online ad bust, lost its biggest customer and almost went out of business, just before it launched its eventual business idea of an online ad exchange. The ad exchange turned out to be quite lucrative. Right Media signed MySpace as a customer, and then attracted an investment from Yahoo, which bought the entire company. In the video below, Walrath continues to explain how he went about to build a liquid exchange for ads. The way he did it was by getting the ad network intermediaries first. He also recalls the buying frenzy that began when DoubelClick was put on the market, drawing a $3.1 billion bid from Google, followed by Microsoft's $6 billion deal to gobble up aQuantive. "It was a wild time." Walrath remembers, "I was getting calls from bankers every day." 
Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/NBNMwcjwAeE/
No comments:
Post a Comment