Tesla Motors started as a Car company, but they should now be considered to be a Battery company for three key reasons:

1. Tesla Leadership has Expertise in Batteries and Energy Systems
2. Batteries Are the Most Important Component of an Electric Vehicle (EV)
3. Tesla can enter other Markets with the Battery Tech they Developed While Building EVs

Electrochemical Blood

The careers of Tesla founders Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning have been largely focused on Battery technology. Their first company together NuvoMedia, which built an eBook reader called the Rocket eBook in the late 90s, was a bet that as battery technology improved eBook readers would become much more feasible. They sold the company in 2000 for $187 million.

This sale would provide the funding necessary for Eberhard to explore the electric car market, another product space that had potential to be deeply changed by...

Invite Media – where I cut my startup and adtech teeth – is the best performing acquisition in Google’s history by revenue growth, quickly scaling from tens of millions into the billions in only a few years.

This incredible feat is as much the result of Google’s Corp Dev and Product teams as it is the Invite Media founders, team and investors. By executing an acquisition strategy that I call “Build And Buy”, Google established a basis for cleaner technical and team integration of our growth machine, and they also insured they had people on staff with domain expertise that could steer the ship even after the original Invite Media team members left Google (the Invite Media mafia is strong).

Any company attempting to solve a problem using technology they fully control and own faces a choice of Buy or Build. Buy means acquiring another piece of technology outright, most often by...