Facebook’s First Acquisition Might End Up Being It’s Biggest Ever

It would be hyperbole to suggest that Facebook’s first acquistion, with many more likely to follow, will be its most important acquistion ever (although I’m not opposed to hyperbole in blog titles as I look to acquire blog traffic). But it’s easy to see how Facebook’s acquisiton of Parakey might end up being one of the key acquisitions of the “Web 2.0” era when it’s all said and done.

Even before this acquisition, Facebook had enough momentum that numerous pundits suggested that Facebook was worth $6 billion. After adding Parakey, Facebook’s strategy of a web platform operating system enabled by THE defacto social network becomes clear. Valleywag noted that this transaction adds “another billion” to Facebook’s value and Techcrunch rightly suggests Microsoft might be the target. And this from a 2 year old company with a 24 year old CEO.

And these weren’t your average successful technologists behind Parakey. These were guys who are already responsible for an Internet product used by 15% of all Internet Users, which is at least a 10X larger user base than Facebook has at the moment.

These are some mighty enormous shoes Facebook is looking to fill.

While I do think that Marc Zuckerberg is a pretty smart guy, me thinks that Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel and David Sze and Paul Madera (I’m sure I’m leaving others out) deserve more credit then they are getting. While I admit that I don’t know that much about Zuckerberg, this strategy is coming together with more vision and perspective than is likely from a 24 year old first time entrepreneur. (Marc Zuckerberg, if I am shortchanging you then please come to this blog and let me know. I’m willing to be put in my place).