David Hauser, who sold Grasshopper for $175 million, shares strategic M&A heuristics with SaaS founders at the Founder 500 conference.
0:00 / 0:17exact quote · 17.8s
720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Leave some meat on the bone. If you want to get the most value for the company, you don't want to have optimized the shit out of everything, right? Because then the acquirer is like, well, I can't really do much with it. And the only acquirers that are left then are strategic acquirers, which are relatively rare as a whole, right?”
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 David Hauser
Opinion
Hauser: Citrix "way overpaid" when it acquired Grasshopper
“We built a great company, but someone way overpaid for it, Citrix.”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 6:30Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Insight
Hauser: Startups should only use venture debt for proven marketing channels
“My number one takeaway on that is only use it for Things you know are working. Marketing channels you know are working. It's not for testing. It's not for hiring. It's not for growing product. It's none of those things. It is, I know that if I spend a dollar h…”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 5:47Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Insight
Hauser: Scaling past $10M revenue requires transitioning to autonomous thinkers
“So from one to ten million dollars in revenue, you can have a lot of doers on the team, which means, hey, do this, come back, do this, come back. To get from 10 to 20, you need a lot of thinkers, which is people that come to you and say, David, Here's what I'm…”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 3:40Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Insight
Hauser: Market trajectory matters far more than total addressable market size
“Addressable market is really one that's interesting to me because a lot of people think about size of addressable market. And I think quite honestly, that doesn't matter for most of us in the room, right? Unless you're doing hundreds of millions of dollars, th…”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 10:00Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Insight
Hauser: Top-line synergies drive the highest M&A valuation multiples
“The least valuable from an acquisition standpoint is cost savings. Right. I buy this company. I get cost savings, least valuable. The next kind of down that line is I buy this company to speed up my market development. And then the most valuable is I increase …”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 19:42Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Opinion
Hauser: Acquirers and VCs value services revenue close to zero
“You will definitely get nowhere close to the value on the services. Right. And we went through this at vanilla when we were talking to VCs. They're like, listen, like 40% of the businesses services, not SAS. We value it at zero. Right. In, in, in the fundraisi…”
David HauserOct 15, 2022▶ 21:28Details behind David Hauser Selling Grasshopper for $176m and how he acquires companies today
Made with StarZero
Turn any episode into a week of clips.
This entire site, over 2,600 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.