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Published · transcript-backedSpeaker unverified: belief
22 Aug 2016 Acquired Special: An Acquirer’s View into M&A with Taylor Barada, head of Corp Dev at Adobe
“If you love that world, those are the folks that end up in banking and I have tons of respect for those guys because I think their jobs are really, really hard and they only get paid if things get done.”
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- Recorded
- 22 Aug 2016
- Publisher
- Acquired
Transcript context
…That’s awesome and that’s a great lead-in. The next segment that we usually do is tech themes where we look around and we try to figure out what technology themes in the industry and the world does this represent to you. I think a really good kind of twist on themes here is how have you tackled M&A differently at the different companies you've been at and how have you guys taken a different kind of strategic organizational approach between each one? Again, M&A is a tool. I mean, I’ve always joked that if I ever do something noteworthy enough that requires a memoir at some point and this stuff makes it in, it would be like it’s not about the deal. There’s the whole book with Lance Armstrong back in the day. It’s not about the bike. It’s like it’s not about the deal. I mean the deal itself is mechanical and if you love that world and there’s people who do and frankly it's a fascinating fun world on a lot of levels. If you love that world, those are the folks that end up in banking and I have tons of respect for those guys because I think their jobs are really, really hard and they only get paid if things get done. Then they oftentimes get a bad rap and I think there’s a lot of great ones out there. But it's just a tool. So the question is, what is your strategy. If you sort of tie that back to your core question of like how are things a little bit different, different companies, I’d say at Yahoo we were going on a lot of different directions when I got in there. It was ’08–’09 when I joined and I found at times things were bubbling up bottoms-up in terms of people being entrepreneurial and trying to get things going at the business unit level. We were going through kind of a restructuring and there wasn’t as much of a clear ‘hey, we got to go do this top-down’ and you would get the inevitable ‘hey, we got a call’ and supposedly Google was looking at buying us and I was like, “So?” Doing what your competitors are doing is not a strategy. So we spent time around getting alignment around strategy. We spent time around locking in the concept of process perspective of an executive sponsor so that you got the alignment early top-down on strategy. Then it made sure that when we were spending time on things, it tied to that. But frankly, Yahoo had a reputation and we worked hard on this but it was just a little bit of reality, some point of culture. We had a reputation for being a little bit slow and so we tried hard to make sure that we were transparent with entrepreneurs around the different hoops and stuff we were going to have to jump through together so that they could feel in control of it and we could feel like we were in it together instead of just feeling like this model with a bureaucratic thing. It wasn’t that but it was just a nature of sort of how things got done in that culture and sort of where they were. The culture of the company affects the process. At Zynga, we had a company that founded like three years before. Mark’s an incredibly aggressive dynamic entrepreneur. If he believed it made sense and we could convince him that we could go do it. I remember working on a deal and we found out that some entrepreneurs had spun off from one company that we thought was interesting and gone and had done something else. He could just tell from talking to the guy that they left behind were the real creative guys that had walked out the door. company that we thought was interesting and gone and had done something else. He could just tell from talking to the guy that they left behind were the real creative guys that had walked out the door. So it was basically like he got off the phone and it was like being in amovie and he was like, “Find those guys.” Someone on the team got them on the phone. Literally 2 hours later we had them on the phone and I was like, “Can you come to San Francisco tomorrow?” and they were like, “No. Are you crazy?” I was like, “Great. We’ll be there at 1:00.”…
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