Clark: Enterprise corporate development focuses on transaction execution led by GMs
Tyson Clark · a16z Podcast | Dealing with Corporate Dealmakers -- When to Talk to Corp Dev · Jan 2, 2019 · at 3:27
Tyson Clark, corporate development partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses how corporate development operates at enterprise tech giants like Oracle, Cisco, and VMware.
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“If you look at, ah, the corporate development teams on the enterprise side, and so I'm talking about Oracle, and Cisco, and VMware, and those kind of companies, they tend to be more M&A execution focused, ah, and so you hear a lot of times, you know, CorpDev picks up the phone when they want to buy you, and that's the only reason why they call. That's not always true, but it's more true for these enterprise companies. And, you know, the following idea there is that most, most enterprise companies have GMs who run businesses, and those GMs are actually the decision makers a lot of times in terms of who, you know, what companies to buy and then the corporate development team just executes the transaction.”
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