Stephanie Cohen, Chief Strategy Officer at Goldman Sachs, explains why large incumbent corporations must partner with the venture community rather than attempt internal innovation for non-core capabilities.
“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 regulated and is publicly traded. And so we need to harness those skills and that intellectual capital, and then we're not going to harness it inside. And those types of things have to happen outside, and which is why we need to partner with The venture community with accelerators, with incubators, but we shouldn't be doing that stuff ourselves.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading:
filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard
(the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Stephanie Cohen
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 …”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 2:29a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
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?”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 7:13a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
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 …”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 9:17a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
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…”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 12:56a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
“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…”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 40:12a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
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…”
Stephanie CohenJan 2, 2019▶ 4:38a16z Podcast | M&A and Innovation, Inside Out
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 1,000 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable,
runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the
moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.
We use essential cookies to make the site work. With your permission we
also use analytics cookies (Google Analytics and Mixpanel) to understand
usage and improve StarZero. See our Cookie Policy.