Most tech startups acquired in 2012 had no VC funding

I'd expect this to be the case every year.<p>Companies can only acquire companies they can afford. When you take outside investment, your investors want a significant return, which places a floor on your acquisition price. The value you have to create gets bigger, and the pool of companies that can acquire you gets smaller.<p>Raising money is hard, but should you want to and manage to, it's very easy to paint your self into a high-valuation corner that blocks all sorts of opportunities to make life-changing amounts of money.

This is rather a meaningless statistic, because acquisitions have a power-law distribution. Most acquisitions are HR acquisitions.

This makes sense, because companies that don't take VC funding are the ones that didn't need it because they were turning profits from the start. However, there are a LOT more companies that don't get VC funding and never succeed.

Less than 1% of companies get VC funding, so getting funded makes you more than 24x more likely to get acquired.<p>I wish the report had more bayesian probabilities to account for survivor-bias.

Seems like a vanity statistic to me. Most companies don't have VC funding so this is to be expected. At least compare this data to prior years.

I would need to see a list of the companies before drawing too many conclusions. Is there some reason the list is not available?

Based on raw numbers, true - based on returns, not even close. It is hard to find a $1B+ or multi-hundred million acquisition that doesn't have a VC investment.

I think many of those were acqui hires.