Michael Levit knows a thing or two about China. As an executive vice president at the e-commerce services company Vendio, he stayed with the company for six months after Alibaba agreed to acquire it in 2010. (It marked the Chinese conglomerate’s first U.S. acquisition.)
Levit says it was long enough to develop a consumer shopping project called Dealio that Alibaba had no interest in owning. So he helped spin it off, renamed it Spigot, and eventually turned it into an application advertising company (users installing one app would receive a suggestion for another). Roughly a year ago, Spigot also sold to a China-based company, publicly traded Genimous, for a reported $252 million.
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Now, Levit, who has teamed up with longtime friend and advisor Rick Marini — cofounder of Tickle (sold to Monster) and Branch (picked up by Hearst) — to form Dragonfly Partners, a new advisory firm that’s matching U.S. companies looking to get sold to China-based companies that are hungry for revenue. They’ve also brought in a third partner, Gary Hsueh, who was most recently Yahoo’s global head of search partnerships and an investment banker with Goldman Sachs before that.[…]
Read the full interview with Michael Levit at TechCrunch, by Connie Loizos
