Today I received the following (company name changed to protect the guilty):
Hi Robert [sic],
Yoyodyne Partners is a technology buy-out fund managed by an experienced team of investors and entrepreneurs. Through committed capital and a network of strategic resources and investor relationships, Yoyodyne has the capability to build long-term value and growth for acquired businesses, thereby providing attractive exit opportunities for software company founders, shareholders and divestitures.
When it’s convenient for you, I would like to learn more about Mozilla Corporation. Please give me a call or send me an email to set it up.
Thank you,
Fred Flintstone, Partner
Yoyodyne Partners
Tech investors and Entrepreneurs
BigCity|AnotherBigCity|AThirdBigCityButStillNotSanFrancisco
555-123-1234
fflintstone@yoyodyne.com
www.yoyodyne.com
Are investors really so desperate to find companies that they’ve resorted to research-less spam? 5 minutes of research would be enough to understand why Mozilla Corporation is not available for sale…
Why not? Better sell why it sill has some value.
5 minutes of research is exactly 4 minutes and 59 seconds more work than it takes to press on a mass email
“Fred Flintstone, Partner” – you’ve gotta be joking!
I changed the names :-)
Thomas Pynchon fan? :)
> 5 minutes of research would be enough to understand
> why Mozilla Corporation is not available for sale…
No, it wouldn’t.
Or, rather, it would, but only if you’re already familiar with certain concepts. We tend to take these concepts for granted in the IT community, but somebody who works at a holding corporation (assuming the thing is indeed as legitimate as it claims to be — which I would council against assuming if anyone were actually considering their offer, but for our purposes here that is not important) might not have ever had any exposure to those ideas.
Remember, the same five minutes of research is going to reveal that the whole things was founded by Netscape, a for-profit company.
You of course understand why Mozilla has to be independent of any single commercial interest, because among other things you understand why it is necessary for the formats and protocols and whatnot that make the internet work to be independent of any single vendor; but your understanding of those principles almost certainly did not come to you in five minutes. Why was it okay for the Mozilla Organization to be founded by a for-profit corporation if it is not okay for the Mozilla Corporation to be owned by one now? The answer to that is complicated and involves a lot of history. You *know* much of the history of the relationship between Netscape, Mozilla, (heaven help us) AOL, Google, the W3C, and various other organizations. He presumably does not. You know that Netscape founded the Mozilla Organization precisely because it had become obvious that Netscape should not continue to single-handedly oversee the Mozilla project, for many of the same reasons that Sun needed to relinquish complete control of OO.o; but five minutes of research would not reveal all of that to someone who hasn’t been following software development for the last twenty years.
Jonadab – it’s simple. If you are thinking about buying a stake in a company, the first thing you find out is who owns it at the moment! And the answer is “The Mozilla Foundation”, which is a 501(c)3 non-profit, and therefore is not permitted to engage in the necessary transactions to sell MoCo (to anyone other than another non-profit) or float it.