More start-ups choosing mergers over IPOs

November 10 - San Jose Mercury - Tell us, Mike McCue. Why did you sell Tellme to Microsoft instead of opting for a dramatic Wall Street debut? Don't you listen to the venture capitalists? Don't you know that Silicon Valley dares to dream big?

But dreaming big, McCue says, is precisely why Mountain View-based Tellme became a Microsoft subsidiary in May for an undisclosed price some reports put at $800 million to $1 billion. Passing up an initial public offering, or IPO, to join Microsoft amid the "smartphone" revolution, he says, is a pivotal step toward fulfilling the grand vision that inspired Tellme in 1999: to make getting information from the Internet as easy as speaking into a phone.

"Life is too short to do something small," says McCue, who at 40 is part of a generation of entrepreneurs who started out as the Internet age was dawning. In the Microsoft deal, "we saw the intersection to create something absolutely huge - serving not just millions of people, but billions." Read More.