One of the by-products of early startup take-outs is that investors end up paying short term capital gains based on their income tax bracket instead of 15% for long term ones. Not sure if this is the case for investors of SiteAdvisor, but since the company was founded not too long ago, it must have been very close as they just got acquired by McAfee.
I met Chris Dixon a couple of months ago to get a preview of the service he had built, which is awesome. In short, SiteAdvisor crawls web sites, registers unique emails and profiles, downloads whatever is available for download, and checks for any malware, spam, email frequency, etc. Once you have installed an extension, you can get web site ratings alongside search engine results – indicating the risky and nefarious ones. Hyper useful (see this example on Claria).
Chris and I had a discussion regarding business models, distribution strategy and I remember telling him that this was something Symantec or McAfee would probably want to pick up very quickly because it was so complementary to their other anti-malware products. I am not surprised they made a move now. As to the terms of the deal, they are not disclosed and only Valleywag has a rumor ($75M) for now.
Congratulations to Chris, his team, and the Bessemer guys who funded the company, and must have gotten a sweet return on their seed investment.
Update: I have no clue as to the actual transaction price, and maybe we’ll find out something in the footnotes of McAfee’s 10Q. However people seem to be pretty quick at dismissing a “reasonable” acquisition price like the ones which are rumored. I very much doubt that SiteAdvisor was in a dire state/financing squeeze – which can only mean to me that they managed to get above the “magic number” that made investors and management happy to sell there and then.
Tags: siteadvisor