Season 2, Episode 7: PowerPoint

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 4 May 2018

⏱️ 78 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Acquired returns with a classic, delving into Microsoft’s first acquisition ever: Forethought Inc, the makers of PowerPoint. Hate it or love it, you can’t deny the combined companies’ impact: by the early 90’s PowerPoint had transformed the way businesses, educators and governments communicate, ensuring job security for pointy-haired Dilbert bosses everywhere.

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Links:

Carve Outs:

Ben: Mindfulness in Plain English and discussion on Hacker News
David: The Birds have landed…

Transcript

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0:00.0	Now my video is taking up half the screen and your video is taking up half the screen.
0:04.8	Good. How do you even, can you snap it or so? Oh there we go. That's got a cool. Can I make your video small? That's kind of like what is the use case for this? I'm looking at an enormous version of myself
0:15.7	And you're small on the corner now. It's Skype for narcissists. Welcome to season 2 episode 7 of acquired the podcast about technology acquisitions and
0:38.2	IPOs I'm Ben Gilbert I'm David Rosenthal and we are your hosts. Today we are digging into the historical
0:45.3	archives to cover the acquisition of a company you've probably never heard of but a
0:49.4	product that you absolutely have used. Probably hundreds or maybe thousands or maybe you've even gotten near 10,000 hours.
0:58.0	This piece of software.
1:01.0	I feel sorry for you if you have. I think I may have. I definitely have.
1:07.0	Investment banking.
1:08.0	All right, listeners, today we are covering Microsoft's 1987 acquisition of Forethought, Incorporated, the
1:15.8	makers of PowerPoint.
1:17.6	This has the honor, I was going to say dubious honor, but this really is an honor.
1:21.8	This was Microsoft's first acquisition and
1:26.1	Apple's first investment in another company, first strategic investment. Not only
1:31.7	that, they were within like three months of each other.
1:35.0	I know.
1:36.5	Most people don't even know that PowerPoint wasn't homegrown.
1:40.0	I mean Word in Excel were homegrown applications but PowerPoint was an acquisition.
1:45.4	Yep an acquisition not just an acquisition a completely separate business line as we will get into
1:51.7	which is not to say that that is necessarily how we will categorize it on acquisition category, but Microsoft kept it as a business line separately based in Silicon Valley, actually on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley was where PowerPoint was developed.
2:05.8	It all comes full circle.
2:07.4	All right, we will dive in more, but before we do that, listeners, if you like the show,
	...

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