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But Breyer can't possibly be content with just one home-run investment. It stands to reason that he wants to build a keiretsu -- a network of startups which partner with each other to build their businesses and boost their common investor's returns. John Doerr and his colleagues at Kleiner Perkins did this in the 1990s, with AOL, Netscape, Amazon.com, Intuit, Excite; Michael Moritz, at Sequoia, likewise, parlayed his firm's investments in Cisco, Yahoo, and Google into other moneymakers. Breyer's only real '90s hit, meanwhile, was RealNetworks -- a thin reed on which to lay a keiretsu.
You have to admire the evil genius of the plan, if true: Breyer, a Facebook board member, can cherry-pick only the most successful app developers before rival venture capitalists have even heard of them. And Breyer, too, can guarantee favored startups something no one else can -- protection from an abrupt decision by Facebook to block or cripple their apps. That power -- implied, never spoken -- also would bear a concomitant threat: Startups who don't play along with Accel, and accept the valuation they're given, may suddenly find Facebook an unfriendly place to write software.
So, Facebook developers, report in -- is the rumor true? Has anyone gotten an offer they can't refuse? A hard sell from Accel? Drop us a word.
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