For those who read my book, it will be clear there is no typo in my title. It is not R&D but really, A&D, acquisition and development. Cisco has been known to consider M&A as the best source of innovations for its future development. So I was not surprised to see that Cisco did two acquisitions recently: ScanSafe, Starent. But what is crazy with them is that between reading this and writing this post, they had done another one (which is not included in my numbers, sorry!): DVN. This gave me the impetus to look at how A&D has developed since I published Start-Up. So here are the numbers (put in parallel with the growth of its employees and sales).

or if you prefer visual info:

Final piece of info: where are the acquistions coming from? No surprise, mostly Silicon Valley: