Loftus: Major tech corp dev teams are perpetually overwhelmed by deal flow
James Loftus · 20VC: How Great VCs Handle Themselves In An M&A Process, Why M&A Has Become The Primary Method of Exit & How The Best M&A Teams Operationalise Their Process with James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead @ Square · Mar 26, 2018 · at 11:17
James Loftus, Corporate Development Lead at Square, describes the structural capacity constraints of corporate development teams across Silicon Valley tech companies.
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“Corporate development teams across the Silicon Valley, including at Facebook and Google, are small compared to the opportunity set that they're evaluating. There's just so many companies out there all the time to evaluate, and if you're even at Square, you know, we have a broad set of product lines, and that means that the universe of startups that could be interesting to us Is massive. It runs the gamut from payments all the way through lending and consumer finance. And so we're always overwhelmed. Every corporate dev team is always overwhelmed by the number of startups that there are out there.”
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