Speaker unverified: belief

Transcript context

…So what we thought we’d do for this episode is kind of stick to our typical structure but instead, as Ben mentioned, talking about one acquisition in particular, we just thought we’d use it as a vehicle to, Taylor, get your insights kind of from the inside of being in Corp Dev and how you think about deals and acquisition as you’re going through them. So we have a bunch of questions but I thought we’d start with sort of the acquisition history and facts section, as usual. I think the best way to kick off would be something that probably most of our listeners are curious about and I’m curious about. How do conversations typically start between Corp Dev and startups? Either when you’re approaching startups or when they’re approaching you, what’s the beginning of the story usually look like? It’s funny. I think you guys even doing this podcast in this focus is, I think, filling a nice gap and need because it’s not something I spend a ton of time thinking about because at some point, it’s just sort of natural and it seems very fluid and relationship driven and not some big moment of, you know, “Hey, we’re for sale,” although those things do happen. It could be very sort of mystical and seem like this dark black art that I find sometimes that entrepreneurs, when it feels that way they tend to pull back and be very reserved because they’re not sure what they can and can’t say, and they always say the wrong thing and which is totally fair. So on our end, what I’ve always done individually when I’ve been a deal lead and I want the culture I try to create on our group is that you remember that the process is fluid and it’s hard to know which ones are going to actually go the distance and lead to a deal and which ones aren’t. The Valley as we all talk about in sort of the broader technology industry outside of the Valley is incredibly small. So because of that, it’s very relationship oriented and because of that, the way these conversations often start is just literally a connection and like, “Hey, you guys are in this space. This company is doing interesting things. You guys should just get to know each other.” I’ve always liked after stumbling across it at some point in the last couple of years, Mark Suster’s blog post on investing in lines, not dots. I think that his concept is that it’s very hard to make a decision when you only have one point in time but when you’ve had connections over time and you have the benefit of sort of seeing people say what they’re going to go do and hopefully go do it or something better, it develops credibility and you have time to sort of process and have a perspective on how it fits in. Oftentimes it’s as simple as that. We get introduced, we sort of say, “Hey, you should talk to someone.” There absolutely is the other sort of 20% case where some company has been going off in a space that we haven’t been tracking or a company that we haven’t necessarily focused on that they either get the stereotypical strategic interest from someone else in a space and they decide that they want to talk to others and see if they want to sell or they want to sell to us or frankly, sell to the highest bidder, that type of thing. And we’ll get those calls, we’ll take those calls and we will sometimes do those. But that’s a high bar and we try hard to develop relationships so that sort of 80% of it is more strategy driven, more relationship driven, and there’s broader perspective in a broader context that’s developed over a long period of time. Yeah. That original kind of introduction when someone says, “Hey, you know, this company is a newer company,” they’re playing around in sort of a similar space or similar customer segment to you guys. What’s the context for starting that relationship? Is it a partnership or is it just like, you know, let’s not play any games, we sort of know that there might be some acquisition at some point in the future? What’s the incentive for that entrepreneur to just kind of start that conversation?…

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