Somewhere out there are a handful of big companies who sell billions of dollars worth of collective research data. I don't know the market but maybe these are companies like Bloomberg, Gartner, etc. one day an exec at one of these companies will want to add startup research (or whatever MM's product is) to their product suite. They will evaluate the cost of building it internally versus buying someone like MM. Keeping in mind that if you build internally, it takes time (maybe a year to replicate), and has significant failure risks. So they do the math and all of a sudden $100m to acquire MM makes sense. Keeping in mind it isn't the exec's $100m and that spending $15m and failing looks a lot worse than spending $100m and doing OK.
MM's job is to keep growing/pivoting until one of these big fish bite. If no one bites, they have to hope they end up with a lot of independent value.
Wow. That means Mattermark has 25 employees at the absolute minimum.
From what I can tell [1] Mattermark is a private angelist with better metrics for VC's and Super Angels. That's not really that hard of a problem. In other words, they probably aren't doing/implementing basic research towards a product solution. That's not to say it's easy to build the business, it just means they don't need to build or prove new technology - which would seem to drive costs/employees.
I am fairly new to the Startup world (only ~3 years) so I still don't really understand why fairly simple problems, using off the shelf pieces, need so many people working on them. Someone please help me understand this. Is it all customer service? Is it having redundancy so that people can work 30 hour weeks?
[1]http://techcrunch.com/2014/12/16/aiming-to-be-a-b2b-google-f...