Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I think we can grade it. So, this is a really interesting one to grade because one of the themes that I think has been pretty pervasive throughout the show that we’ve done is that the best acquisitions that we’ve given the highest grades to have been ones where the acquirer follows the mantra of “Leave the team alone, it’s all about the people, let them do their thing, don’t mess with the magic.” We heard that with Pixar where it was the reverse. It was like Pixar coming in and leaving the Disney people or letting Disney get back to feeling the creative magic. With Instagram, and Bungie that Ed Fries was talking about. This is the total opposite. eBay comes in and really mucks around and everybody leaves. I wonder if that’s just characteristic of the time period. Other acquisitions that we’ve ripped apart have that characteristic too from that time period where it’s all about integration, it’s all about “Great, we like your product. Now it’s time to move to the beat of our drum.” I think it’s really only recently that companies have figured out that leave it alone thing. Yeah, the “Facebook style acquisition.” There’s another great quote from David Sacks in the Tech Republic article where he’s talking about the first meeting that happened after the acquisition, the integration meeting, and the eBay team gets all the key people from PayPal together in a room and they book a three-hour meeting and they show up with a 137-page PowerPoint deck. The PayPal guys were like, “Hey, we’ve never had a three-hour meeting in our lives. What is PowerPoint?” At the end of it, David Sacks says, “Man, if we stay here, we're going to have to create a whole new department just to do PowerPoint just so that we can communicate with these guys.”…

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