I don't understand this valuation. I've only used Quip a bit but it doesn't seem like an amazing piece of software. Do they have a massive user base? Did they do a fantastic job at enterprise sales? Do they have a lot of recurring revenue?
1. Talent: As others say, an all star team. I've interacted with some of them as a vendor (Quip is our customer) and know a couple of them as friends of friends, and they have a rockstar team.
2. Integration: This is going to add collaborative document sharing to Salesforce's product line. Much like the Chatter acquisition to beef up their "collaborative, connected customers" story.
3. DATA: Essentially, Quip's metadata is the intra-organization graph of who collaborates with who. While Salesforce needs to be careful how they are going to use it (and definitely need to create the technical infrastructure to take advantage of this data), this is a deep well of customer knowledge that they can parlay into selling other Salesforce products.
I think the other 2 are nice, but I'm not sure I buy them. I've used the product and for a rockstar team it was kind of crap. They're trying to build slack-dropbox-googledocs all in one, and it's substantially less capable at each of those tasks than the individual products. Maybe now they'll have the resources to build it out and make it actually good, but I have no idea how such a product in its current state is worth 750M.
The data bulletpoint makes the acquisition fit in more storywise with SFDC's recent ML acquisitions (no one asks about the not-recent ones), but I don't know if it justifies the price. I also doubt there will be much integration and would take a bet Quip will be no more in a year. (I'm on the inside but I have no knowledge of this deal, nor do I really care about it to poke around...)
What I'm more curious about is whether they integrate with Salesforce? Where do they make sense under the salesforce umbrella?
The price tag of $750M is a little too much for me but I'm anyway not verse in these kind of deals (and I was under impression that Quip is in trouble since I haven't see a lot of people using it).
Maybe Quip doesn't, but Salesforce certainly does.
Note I don't fully understand the valuation either but it seems like there are definitely synergies here.