Yahoo! Mail
Yahoo! made a deal with the online communications company Four11 for co-branded white pages. Marvin Gavin, who worked at Four11 as the Director of International Business Development, said "We always had a bias about being acquired by Yahoo. They were more entrepreneurial than Microsoft. We had a great cultural fit – it made a lot of sense." In the end, Yahoo! acquired Four11 for $96 million. The purpose behind acquiring Four11 was the company's RocketMail webmail service, which launched in 1997. Yahoo! announced the acquisition on October 8, 1997, close to the time that Yahoo! Mail was launched. Yahoo! chose acquisition rather than internal platform development, because, as Healy said, "Hotmail was growing at thousands and thousands users per week. We did an analysis. For us to build, it would have taken four to six months, and by then, so many users would have taken an email account. The speed of the market was critical."
List of mergers and acquisitions by Yahoo!
Yahoo's first acquisition was the purchase of Net Controls, a web search engine company, in September 1997 for US$1.4 million. As of April 2008, the company's largest acquisition is the purchase of Broadcast.com, an Internet radio company, for $5.7 billion, making Broadcast.com co-founder Mark Cuban a billionaire. Most of the companies acquired by Yahoo are based in the United States; 78 of the companies are from the United States, and 15 are based in a foreign country. As of July 2015, Yahoo has acquired 114 companies, with Polyvore being the latest.