Loftus: Extreme M&A anecdotes distort public perception of corporate development
James Loftus · a16z Podcast | Dealing with Corporate Dealmakers -- When to Talk to Corp Dev · Jan 2, 2019 · at 2:16
James Loftus, corporate development partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses why startup founders often view corporate development teams skeptically.
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“I mean, honestly, I think that one of the challenges is, is that the situations that corporate development teams are involved in tend to be sort of very high stress, very, very high emotion. And so sort of people have a lot of stories that bounce around the marketplace, whether they go well or whether they go poorly, they're always very intense times, both for the corporate development teams, but also especially for the startup founders. And so I think that the result is The anecdotal evidence sort of outweighs what actually happens because people sort of talk about the better stories more.”
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