M&A

“I won't be surprised to see a huge wave of M&A of these businesses, because they're still good businesses fundamentally, or you can make them good businesses, And they just aren't going to be, like, Stripe, or these massive things that capture fundamental piec…”

“That's how number two and number three get bought. Not because there's a panic for land grab, but because I didn't get what I wanted, right? That, that, that's when you got to be really thoughtful as number two because that that's when you get bought as number…”

“I love M&A as a way to create value for shareholders because I don't know of another way on a risk adjusted basis on a certainty level that Is more likely to create massive shareholder value than doing sensible M&A.”

“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors and because of the track record and what I can deploy that at on doing acquisitions. The second biggest lev…”

“I integrate from the moment that we agree to buy a company, we're starting the integration process. And the day we close the acquisition, Gazaam. We're in there and we're standardizing everything as much as we possibly can.”

“I have a number of companies that are in M&A processes, so I do think there are real acquisitions that are gonna happen.”

“What I tell my friends and some portfolio companies I've invested in is you're about to sell, push harder than ever. Put the gas on the pedal and go, right? Give them a reason to actually have some real urgency. Show them you're growing, and that gives you lev…”

“AI does not know to look through lies yet, right? So people tell you stuff, and you know it's a lie, but the AI will not know. It will not be able to figure out the lie.”

“Maybe by the end of 20, 26, we'll have some AI, or maybe in 20, 27, but right now that's not the case yet.”

“I've always thought of Wall Street as the buyer of the product that venture capitalists create because of the eventual liquidity is either an M&A or an IPO. And now the price is being set by that group and that institution. So if I know what they value, even i…”

“When somebody is you know, is looking to buy a company at the end of the day, you know, they're buying, you know a platform, a company, to essentially make it part of the bigger entity and really grow it, right? And so I think it's a large deal at some level, …”

“Most of our growth is going to come through building new great products versus going out and buying stuff.”

“It is true that like, it's such a weird, opaque market, this Sort of two to twenty million of ARR and like even pretty sophisticated founders who may have even raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars or feel like they understand the space they operate in…”

“It's not unusual that I hear about situations where I'm like, okay, well, yeah, but you left like you left like 60 or 70 or 80% of the value of the company on the table because you didn't know what was going on here. Like you didn't understand like the univers…”

“The only kind of M&A that I am interested in as an adventure capitalist is if a strategic comes to you and begs to buy it and is gaga for it and will pay a crazy price. That is the only kind of M&A venture capitalist will care about”

“I think there's more value in like staying in your lane. If you have an expertise, it's much easier to grow from there.”

“And if it's the ladder where you really want to build something that has real scale, that services lots of clients across lots of service lines, then M&A is just a muscle that you've got to work out and exercise.”

“Whenever you have a large kind of market team like we do, like a couple thousand people, before a salesperson is comfortable with selling a product, it takes like nine months to nine to 12 months. And by being able to bring the zero of the product after month …”

“The one thing that I would have thought we would have done more, having a currency for acquisitions, was one of the reasons we went public. It hasn't materialized in the way we would have thought at the time. We tend to do a better job building our own busines…”

“The asset management industry is fraught with bad M&A. It's hard to merge two completely disparate cultures. Tuck-ins are fine, but bringing in big stock mergers are tricky in the asset management industry where your people are your asset.”

“AI is such a disruptive phenomenon that every company, every incumbent is under threat from like AI in general. And so a lot of the ways that You deal with the threat is you just acquire the DNA of the future. And so I think it's, I think there's gonna be a lo…”

“I negotiate explicitly for unrestricted access to the company from the moment we sign an agreement. Immediate access to employees is an essential condition for us. This is not commonplace in M&A.”

“I think, like, one of my predictions for next year is, like, we're going to see a lot of M&A, and I think the Trump administration's really kind of sending a signal, like, we're not going to mess with your acquisitions anymore”

“Our best outcomes, as an aside, have always been an oligopolistic industry structure where there's three or four players who are going to irrationally compete to own the asset because they want it and they don't want their competitor to get it leads to the bes…”

“I think increasingly in the future, you know, with the whole suite of products that are possible in our space and with the benefits we think of bundling those together, we're especially interested in earlier than most companies in their maturity using M&A as a…”

“Usually you don't spend any new money when you're being acquired, because every dollar that goes out the door has some revenue multiple attached to it.”

“You buy a company, it's doing very well, and then three or four years later, you've doubled the profit. What did you do? You went in with a toolkit, and you went into the, attacked the pricing using algorithms and elasticity analysis. You've attacked the compe…”

“If you get an M&A offer as a founder or an investor, and the founders make the decisions, the VCs don't make the decisions. If your TAM isn't really accelerating, take it.”

“There's this metaphor of like exits off the highway that a lot of founders use. And when you get an exit off of the highway, if you say no, then you need to know like the next exit is 50 miles away or a hundred miles away. And I think M&A for founders is Is ab…”

“Look, it's not going to make them, quote, an AI leader, but it, you know, they're doing the smart thing that existing corporations do, buying relatively new technology to, you know, to try.”

“Being number two, just as founders, it's a cheat code. Like just don't raise too much. Be acquirable. If you're number two, be kind. Right? And you'll be shocked in frothy times the offers you'll get.”

“You know, many years ago, we had a company that was in the analog wireless space. You know, when digital came out, what they did is they bought all the analog bandwidth around the country through acquisition. They acquired close to three hundred million dollar…”

“For four years, it was just a desert. A bunch of companies silently died. The state blocked IPOs. They're blocking M&As. It was just an all-out anti-tech assault.”

“In general, a company usually needs, in my view, and you may disagree, it needs to be about a hundred exercise of the small company in order to acquire them.”

“If you're not one of the key players, the minute you move away from the cap table to, you know, making it up as you go along, if you're not one of the key players, you're very vulnerable to, you know, you're basically, Depending on the kindness of strangers, a…”

“We'll probably do two or three deals this year, another two or three next year.”

“So look, I said this a few months ago, I think we're entering the golden age, a golden age of M and A right now. I think there's a bunch of factors that are melding together to make it a point in time where the consolidators are getting bigger. They're taking …”

“And so in all those cases, these companies are spending one to three percent of their market cap on the MNAs, which is not like, that's not transformative MNA. It's really like, again, these big consolidators are just taking call options bets on these fast gro…”

“The number one advice I give founders on when they're testing the waters on M and A is to not tell anyone at their company. Because as soon as you get folks excited, it's a little bit like raising around, but at an extreme, as soon as people at the company, ev…”

“And then the life lesson for founders, it's tough is look, Scott's gone now. Right. It's always a weird thing when you do M&A and it's not with the CEO because there's a good chance you outlast them.”

“It's very hard to M&A your way into the business, because there's a origination culture that's been built here for 1520 years. I mean, just in credit. And to align yourself in a principle way, and to actually be able to talk, the origination isn't just having …”

“And with M&A, it's the same thing. I actually think it's, do you have prior experience working with this company? Yes or no? So I would say that's the number one advice is like, Have you worked with them before?”

“There's such a view that, like, large companies are bad, and we gotta bust them, and we're not gonna let them do any M&A. And as a result of that, small companies no longer get bought by big ones. And for me, it's a disaster, because if I fund small companies,…”

“Eventually, when you're the number two and you get the heavy squeeze from the adjacent acquirer, it often makes sense to fold because, you know, because otherwise they might buy the number one and then you're done.”

“And I think if you look at the next wave of startups, a dramatic decrease in M&A, because instead of buy, you built and the aqua hire didn't prove out to be the best use of equity. A lot of the decision of buy versus build became easier as you thought about wh…”

“Plaid sold, right? Plaid sold and the government stopped it. And I think that that was you know, to me, a interesting moment in The government getting involved in something that was debatable, and I think it also tells big companies, like, don't waste your tim…”

“All their competitors along the way, or almost all of them other than Meditech, became 30 other companies glued together through M&A and take public, take private, crazy transactions.”

“If you look at the median M and a valuation for Software companies, it's, I think the last day, it's a seventy million, right?”

“This is actually quite dominated by the fact that M&A is alive again. And so we're going to have outcomes”

“This expectation that the new administration was going to be sort of this, like, at least on the regulatory side, or at least on the deal side, the sort of like libertarian green light, everything is not really panned out.”

“I won't say publicly on the Technology Bros podcast that we want cool technology companies to fail because they're bad at business development. But those do present interesting opportunities for us from an M&A perspective, for sure.”

“Just remember when you do have M&A discussions with companies, you're being bought to solve a problem. The problem might be a feature gap. The problem might be, I got three years behind. The problem might be, I'm going to miss the quarter. The problem might be…”

“Watch who they bring to the early meetings. If they drag a very technical leader, right? It's a sign, right? It's a sign, right? If they bring a GM of the business unit or something, they're going to care about your revenue, right?”

“And startlingly, the R squared on total Earnings growth is almost as strong as organic growth only, and I think the reason for that is that when a company is approving acquisitions and we're obviously in control of that decision, we're typically doing it with …”

“Manager consolidation and M&A is a theme that has been emerging and dominant for the last couple of years. But it is an emergent trend from several themes that are happening under the surface within this asset class around fundraising, product proliferation, i…”

“So to try to reduce the amount of time for DD, we did a face-to-face, which I'd never done before, but I a hundred percent recommend it.”

“Liquidity has been a major problem and especially during the four years of Biden and it just coincided with really bad policies and, you know, a derf of M&A lack of IPOs I think that's gonna change in the next four years.”

“I think there's gonna, you're gonna see a tidal wave of M&A after four years of not being able to get anything done. I think there's an enormous amount of pent up demand.”

“This might be the worst advice I've given in 12 years, was always say no if you have something good. It might have been wrong.”

“The biggest lever, the biggest component is the differential between what I raise capital at due to my relationships with mostly institutional investors, and because of the track record, and what I can deploy that at I'm doing acquisitions. The second biggest …”