CMC Library Ledger

How to Research Branches Within Large Tech Companies

Let's say an opportunity comes up to interview for GV, previously known as Google Ventures, and you set out to prepare for your interview using the career research tools of the CMC Library. It is fair to assume that with a company as large as Google, you will be able to look into just about anything, including subsidiaries. But after doing some research you realize that "Google Ventures", aside from having a sparse website, doesn't really seem to appear anywhere. How should you approach researching these types of entities?

Large tech companies, such as Google or Amazon, are well documented as major players across industries (and XTech industries are at an all-time high). Some examples of these smaller divisions within tech companies include GV (Google Ventures), Google Health, and Amazon Pharmacy. However, these branches or divisions within major tech companies are often opaque and difficult to research.

The first thing to do is to reframe your mentality to view these teams within large companies as small companies themselves. The Library Ledger covers relevant research tips, such as finding social media presence, in our Research Tips for Small Companies blog post. Many of those techniques apply to this scenario as well.

Using Amazon Pharmacy as an example, we will demonstrate how to research a smaller branch within a larger tech company. 

Searching Within Company Reports and Profiles

Leverage the traditional company research resources creatively to find any mention of the team or division. For Amazon Pharmacy, start by going finding Amazon's MarketLine Company Report through the Emerging Markets Information Service (EMIS) platform. Search by company name and then on the search results page click Reports under Categories and Company under Topics to filter for Marketline and GlobalData company reports (appears as "Amazon Web Services Inc"). 

Open the report and CTRL+F for “pharmacy”. Note that only three mentions of that keyword occur in the entirety of the company report. This may seem like a dead end, but from the mentions you learn that in June 2018 Amazon agreed to acquire PillPack, an online pharmacy, and that in November 2020 Amazon launched an online pharmacy delivering prescription medications in the US. This tells you several things. The first is that this branch of Amazon is relatively new and that often results in there being little to no public information available. It also gives you the name of the pharmacy service acquired by Amazon to fulfill this branch, and chances are that you will be able to find information about PillPack.

To that end, go to PitchBook (great for smaller and private company research) and search for PillPack. You will find a robust profile and just from the overview you will learn that it is a “provider of online pharmacy services designed to offer medications in personalized packets” and is indeed an operating subsidiary of Amazon. The profile takes you through the financials of the company and significantly, towards the end of the profile, links to several news articles about Amazon in the online pharmacy space. News items are a valuable resource for researching something like Amazon Pharmacy. 

Searching Within Industry Research

With PillPack’s PitchBook profile in hand, the next action we recommend trying is searching for Amazon Pharmacy in a broad-reaching industry research database such as EMIS (same as above). Making sure that your search terms are connected, see the initial results here, comprising of news items and other report-types, which can be narrowed down to just show industry reports or items related solely to the US, among other criteria.

Before narrowing the search results down, take a glance and see if you notice any patterns. Are the results mostly from one country or region? Do the keywords show up in industry reports or just news? Both what you do and don’t find can tell you something about what you’re researching.

Another place to check is PitchBook's Research Center, which you can access from the left menu in PitchBook under Research:

Search the Research Center by any relevant key words you can think of, as well as by company name. Even if you don't find anything directly related to the tech company branch you are interested in, you may still discover info about broader trends in investment, consumers, and the market outlook of the space.

Acquisitions

It is reasonable to conclude that many large tech companies branching into different industries are doing so through acquisitions. Finding those acquired companies can shed light on how the tech company is participating in a particular space. As mentioned before, search PitchBook and CB Insights for the profiles of these acquired companies to learn more about the acquisition and other relevant news.

You can also search Statista, a great market research platform, for industry dossiers, statistics, and market outlooks related to your keywords.

Check Company Press Releases, Websites, & Blogs

At this point, you know how Amazon has ventured into the pharmacy space through acquiring PillPack. However, there may be cases in which how a tech company is venturing into a specific industry cannot be established. Even then, there are a handful of final things to try: check for company websites and blogs (either of the team itself or mentions on the larger company website); search on Google and make sure to go past the first page of results - there is often information buried in results that may not seem relevant at first glance; and look for press releases (Factiva is a great platform to find those).

Network with Alumni Industry Professionals

And what if you truly find nothing by searching online and within library databases?  Look for an alumni connection, perhaps on the team itself or even at the company as a whole, with whom you could connect. Leverage resources for finding contacts to set up a coffee chat with someone who might be able to connect you to the team of Amazon Pharmacy or at least tell you what they know about it. There is always a way to dig deeper!