Speaker unverified: belief

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…But you’re still going to somebody you think has influence but actually there’s no context on the relationship and back to that being the most important thing. I can totally see how that can blow up deals. Exactly. It really blows up deals and that’s the other thing why I say like there’s almost no misstep that you can’t get over if actually it makes business sense. That’s the other reason why I say getting people the mind space of like you’re building a great business, you’re going to get the eggs that you deserve and we’re looking for a collaboration to figure out whether we’re the right home for it. It takes all the pressure off because the real answer is you don’t need to micro manage and over manage it. We do this off all the time and if we’re approaching you with that mindset, like we’re in it together to figure out. Because the biggest reason people do that is because they’re in value optimization mode in the back of their mind, I think, I got to maximize value. And it’s like yeah, totally, it is literally in the by-laws. It’s your fiduciary responsibility, right? We get it. So it’s part of that. But if you over manage that and over play it at the wrong times, it comes across awkward. Again, if it actually makes sense, you’re probably going to recover from it. So even if you do, it's not that big a deal. Like I said, I’ve never not done a deal but I’ve had deals where it was much harder to get there because someone figured out some way to get in front of either the CEO or some other head of a business unit or something earlier than we probably would have ideally wanted. Or sometimes it comes in that way and that’s fine too, but then people got to do their job. Where to bring that whole thread back around to the core question that you asked – I think it was Ben – the business owner of that sort of head of product is actually an extremely important relationship as well. Like you should have a sense of if you were king for a day and ran that business, where would you think that the startup that you run fits in. And then how do you figure out who’s responsible for that part of the business. That’s absolutely just as important a relationship. I would never say only focus on that relationship and ignore corp dev but I also would never say focus on corp dev and don’t worry about that relationship. You kind of have to have both and sometimes, again, this probably also is like the venture. It’s very organic and wherever you have an in, a warm intro, take the warm intro and then ask the questions of ‘hey, should I talk to someone in corp dev or whatever?’ I have business unit partners who are very sophisticated of sponsored deals many times and part of the job of being a good product manager, let alone a business unit product owner or GM is understanding the outside market and knowing the ecosystem that you’re in. So they should be out there meeting startups and stuff. So oftentimes they will meet someone and they’ll hand it off and say, “You know what, I’ve met with this guy once or twice for coffee. I kind of like where he’s headed. Nothing to do here. I’m not looking to do it. He’s not going to sell. nd they’ll hand it off and say, “You know what, I’ve met with this guy once or twice for coffee. I kind of like where he’s headed. Nothing to do here. I’m not looking to do it. He’s not going to sell. But I just kind of want to get him on Corp Dev’s radar. Can you meet with him? That type of thing.” Other times, we’ve partnered with the business unit to develop a strategy overall and we kind of know the spaces that we're sort of particularly interested in and we’ll find the relationship or company, and we’ll get intros and we’ll pass them through. I think that is one difference between the VC and M&A world is that sourcing is not some big magical thing. Every now and then we’ll find something that we didn’t expect because we’ve made an extra effort to get out and beat the bushes. But we’re out there in the market. There’s only so many acquirers. People find us 9 out of 10 times.…

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