Technology

Mozy

Founder: Josh Coates
Acquisition Price: $76 million
Buyer: EMC
Funding: $1.9 million from Wasatch Venture Fund, Tim Draper, and Drew Major

The Runup:
Perhaps taking a cue from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, who rebuffed a $1 billion offer from Yahoo, Mozy founder Josh Coates spurned advances from a major Internet player last year (rumored to be Google), holding out for a better offer. In October, Mozy, a provider of online data security, got acquired by surprise buyer EMC for nearly 40 times the investment.

The Payoff:
"Deals aren't like winning a lottery. Deals are messy slugfests," says Coates, who studied computer engineering at the University of California at Berkeley and started enterprise online storage company Scale8 before founding American Fork (Utah)-based Berkeley Data Systems and launching Mozy, its consumer-oriented storage service, in 2005. He says nothing in his career prepared him for the deal, which involved hundreds of hours "duking it out" with attorneys, directors, and bankers. EMC plans to keep the Mozy brand intact, but will move Coates into its existing technology division.