The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 9 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Steve Jobs Had Product Leaders Run M&A to Prevent Deal Quotas
“Steve Jobs, who was still running the company at the time, had a pretty strong philosophy that if you have an M&A team who's being judged on how many deals a year they bring in, then you're going to be doing M&A just to do M&A. So what he did is he had the pro…”
Founders Should Only Take Strategic Corporate Investment in Later Rounds
“So as entrepreneurs are considering strategic investment, I think it's something that they should do in later rounds of financing, and they should only do it if they know the company pretty well and feel very comfortable that that's where they would like to be…”
Apple's M&A Strategy Focused Entirely on Talent Over Revenue Streams
“We were very much focused on finding great teams. It was never about acquiring revenue streams. It was finding great people who wanted to come to Cupertino.”
Partnerships Replace Speculative M&A Valuation Models With Actual Operational Data
“And the models that you build during M&A inherently have a lot of made-up numbers in them, but once you have worked with someone in a partnership, you're replacing a lot of the guesswork with real actual numbers based on a live implementation, which helps in a…”
Strategic Minority Investments Function as Slow-Motion M&A
“I view it as what I call slow motion M&A, and the idea is you're acquiring a piece of the company during the investment, and during that process, you're doing the normal diligence that you would if you were going ahead and making an investment.”
Yelp Only Makes Venture Investments in Startups It Intends to Acquire
“We wouldn't have made the investment had we not been interested in a Acquiring the company, but this really allowed us to test a lot of our theories related to the product experience and also just integration of the technologies and basically making sure every…”
Acquired Team Enthusiasm for an Acquirer Only Diminishes After Closing
“If you don't genuinely see that alignment and enthusiasm, it won't be as great as it is before you write them the check, right? So you have to make sure that it's Truly and sincerely there, because it will probably only diminish.”
Running Three to Five Concurrent Acquisition Dialogues Yields Better Outcomes
“You can get three to five meaningful dialogues going on at the same time, and that's almost certain to lead to a better outcome for you and your investors than just having the dialogue with one company.”
Unattached VCs Build Credibility and Value During M&A Negotiations
“If the VCs can kind of step in as a more seasoned, maybe less emotionally attached person, Player at the table to really help get to those truths and understanding earlier, it can be really beneficial for the shareholders of the company that's being acquired b…”