Insight
Cohen: Strategy and M&A belong within the same team
“I think about it as the way that we think about it is that we want strategy and MNA to be in the same place. So instead of having a group of people that goes off and does strategy and a group of people that goes off and does MNA, and by the way, incentivizing …”
Insight
Cohen: Financial models should test assumptions, not produce single valuation targets
“And then you get yourself in a lot of trouble when that gets to a single answer. It's like 1.25 billion dollars, right? That inevitably that's wrong. What those, what the math teaches you is what do you need to believe in order for it to succeed?”
Insight
Cohen: Fear of losing targets to rivals drives maximum acquisition prices
“When I was on the sell side, my favorite thing was to find the buyer who not only wanted to win, but was afraid to lose. When you had the guy or the gal who thought that their arch, their biggest rival was going to buy something, that was how you actually got …”
Insight
Cohen: Companies with strong distribution should acquire secondary market players
“But if you're a big company, and you have access to, for example, clients and distribution, maybe the party that's a number two is a number two, because they don't have access to that. And so then they have the same product, but they don't have access. So then…”
Insight
Cohen: Isolating innovation projects risks alienating employees driving core daily operations
“You could get to a place where you actually distract the whole organization because in an organization of tens of thousands of people, there's a lot of people every day who just have to be with their clients, execute, and they need to have fun doing that and n…”
Insight
Cohen: M&A succeeds when integration leaders sit with dealmakers from inception
“When companies decide to do something for strategic reasons, when everyone gets together and decides, it's the right thing to do, and by everyone, I mean, it doesn't mean everyone has to agree, because getting to consensus in some of these situations may actua…”
Insight
Cohen: Successful tech M&A requires giving acquired talent autonomy to innovate
“A lot of times you're buying the business, not just for the product or the technology, but it's for the people and being humble enough to actually leave those people alone to continue to innovate and succeed.”
Insight
Cohen: Enterprise acquisition synergies fail when buyer personas differ
“The second thing is, you know what you bought, and what I mean by know what you bought, that's particularly important in the enterprise space, where it's more confusing, right? So, you're a company, you sell a lot to a certain sector, and then you buy another …”
Insight
Cohen: Acquired companies need internal 'bat phone' contacts during integration
“Taking a group of people internally who have experience with M&A, who know the internal business, who know how to get things done from your internal engineering team, from compliance, Having an internal team and pairing them with the company, I think is really…”
Insight
Cohen: Acquiring for product and tech justifies paying for market leaders
“But when you're going after product and technology, my hunch is that the paying for the number one makes sense.”
Insight
Cohen: Red team exercises prevent large companies from making M&A mistakes
“And if you stop and actually have a group of really smart people internally and maybe with your external advisor say, we're going to show up for one day, for two hours, and we're going to make the case on the other side, and in the process of making that case,…”
Insight
Cohen: Regulated corporations fail when building non-core technology internally
“I think companies get in trouble when they try to do things That should happen externally, internally. And what I mean by that is I think there are certain types of talent that have no desire to work inside an organization that has 40,000 people, that's highly…”
Insight
Cohen: Competing internal builds against external software prevents insular development
“If you're competing the own, your own internal projects with either buy and by buy, I mean, just buy the product from a software or other perspective, or buy meaning by the company. If you're doing that in a relatively systematic way, I think you're avoiding s…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Cohen: Goldman Sachs bans customization of off-the-shelf software
“So we have a rule now against doing that. So, so I hope for that makes people feel better. We're going to stop the tweaking of the, of stuff that's generally available off the shelf.”
Insight
Cohen: Protecting core-business internal startups is harder than isolated ventures
“But another thing that we're focused on that we've talked about is cash management and payments. Well, this gets to the very core of what we do every day. It's the, it's our core investment banking clients. It's core to our internal payment functions. And so, …”
Insight
Cohen: Treat internal corporate organizations as customers to protect innovation
“So the way that we like to think about it is we like, in places where we're worried about that, we try them to treat the internal organization like a customer.”
Insight
Cohen: Combining build and buy strategies forces enterprises to engage specialized startups
“The second thing is if you have a perspective around it's not buy versus buyer build, it's both, then you are going to force yourself to deal with individual vendors in a lot of cases because you are looking for very specific solutions. Of course, like every b…”
Opinion
Cohen: Underfunded female founders represent a prime commercial investment opportunity
“We felt that women were not getting the capital that they needed or deserved, and that it really meant that they were a good investment. So there's a lot of capital out there, which many people know, but in a place that's being under invested, we thought there…”
Insight
Cohen: Operating divisions should be responsible for their own strategy
“The other thing we decided, and this was advice I got, I think I still agree with it, is that divisions Should be responsible for their own strategy.”
Insight
Cohen: Strategy teams should embed junior members into business units for free
“I'll send actually generally a more junior member of my team down into the division and basically offer their services for free.”
Insight
Cohen: Corporate strategy is for business transformation, not minor tweaks
“And the idea was don't call us when your revenues are off by three percent, and you're just trying to tweak your business model. Call us when you're trying to fundamentally change how you're serving your customer, when you're, when you feel like you have a new…”
