The company now called Broadcom started life in 1961 as a chip division of Hewlett-Packard. It moved to Agilent in the 1999 split. In 2005 KKR and Silver Lake bought it for about $2.7 billion and named it Avago. By its 2009 offering it sold chips for phones, factories and networks from bases in San Jose and Singapore. Markets were still shaky from the financial crisis, and few tech companies dared to go public.

A Spinoff of a Spinoff

Avago had no founder in the usual sense. It was Hewlett-Packard's old chip division, passed to Agilent, then sold to private equity. The new owners set it up with headquarters in Singapore and San Jose. The bet was focus. Avago made analog, optical and radio chips, including the filters that let a phone pick a clean signal out of the air. Hock Tan became chief executive in 2006 and ran the company with a sharp eye on profit margins.

Small Fish, Big Appetite

Avago priced its offering at $15 a share in August 2009, at the top of its range, and raised about $648 million. The shares closed their first day at $16.18. Then Tan started buying. Avago bought LSI in 2014. In 2016 it bought Broadcom for about $37 billion and took the bigger company's name. Broadcom later bought CA Technologies, Symantec's enterprise business and VMware. It still trades on Nasdaq under Avago's old ticker, AVGO.

Cover: Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Pieter van der Heyden. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for big fish eating little fish (the acquirer).