Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…Right. This leads to a point that David and I have been talking about since kind of a couple of years ago before we were doing Acquired and we were thinking about if we were going to do a podcast, maybe this would be an interesting area to go after because it sure seems like nobody talks about these deals after they’re done. People talk about them when they’re announced, people talk about them when they close. But there’s never this retrospective or like did that actually go well, or trying to understand what trends can we extrapolate from these deals that have gone well and then hence us starting this podcast. Why is that, in your opinion? Like why do we not see this sort of coverage later on beyond just the fact that that information is less actionable at that point? So one of the reasons is it’s much harder. It’s much harder to write a good comprehensive story on that. It wouldn’t necessarily be sort of feature-y type of story because you really have to dig in and sort of start at the beginning, like you guys do a good job of it on this podcast. But from a reporter standpoint, we need to decide do I want to spend the work on sort of figuring out exactly how good this acquisition was from a culture standpoint, from a financial standpoint. I have to go back, I have to figure out sort of exactly how this acquisition may have been profitable or unprofitable. A lot of the names the numbers are masked because once a big company buys a little company, they don’t necessarily need to break all of the numbers that used to publicly available when that first company was public.…

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