David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…If you never experienced Paper, you have until the end of July to rush out and download it, play with it. Yeah. So pour one out this weekend for Facebook Paper. Then lastly, super interesting, we posted this in the Slack community. The SEC filing for LinkedIn detailing all of the ins and outs and blow by blow of the acquisition process came out and it is super interesting. So, we’ll link to this in the show notes and it's also in the Slack group. But, turns out there were actually five parties involved in bidding for LinkedIn. So Microsoft obviously and then everybody assumed, you know, and we speculated on the show that Salesforce, it’s now come out, Salesforce was heavily involved in the acquisition but there were three others. Two have been identified as Google and Facebook. The Facebook story is pretty interesting apparently, assuming that Facebook is the party that is referred to in the filing. Reid Hoffmann had a meeting with the CEO of the company, of Party D or whoever it was, Mark Zuckerberg, and said, “Hey. There’s actually this acquisition process for LinkedIn going on. Would Facebook be interested?” Zuckerberg was like, “No.” So that was not an involved process with Facebook. But Google apparently went pretty far down the path and then so did the mysterious Party C. Nobody knows who Party C is but they also spent a lot of time looking at LinkedIn. The other interesting thing in this filing is the bidding war. So the first bid that Microsoft put in for LinkedIn was $160 a share. If folks might remember, the deal got down at $196. So what happened, and I think that was about $5 billion worth of value that’s the difference there. So it turns out, so Salesforce and Microsoft were bidding against each other, started at $160. Deal was on track to happen. Microsoft had won it at $182 per share. The merger agreement was being negotiated, everything was going along. And then Salesforce or Party A as it’s referred to in the filing just comes in over the top after having essentially pulled out with a $200 per share bid kind of out of nowhere, but the bid was not all cash. It was mostly stock. So that kind of threw the big wrench in the process. The whole deal with Microsoft had to get renegotiated and ended up getting done at $196 all cash. Wow. Great move, Salesforce.…

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