Speaker unverified: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah. And what specifically are you looking for? Is it cool, the financial, check; cool, there’s no lawsuits against them, check; cool, your product is growing with users, check? Those sorts of things. Look, ultimately you’re going to do a deal if it makes strategic sense. The technology product fit is there and the financials you think makes sense for your shareholders, right? For us, the fourth one that I would put over, that cuts across all of that is just the people as we’ve already talked about. So the hard part about the deal is these are all – Even though we have a “process” and every large acquirer is sort of a repeat player, so all the places that I’ve been and done this role are definitely in that and the other ones are people like you've mentioned, so Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, etc. Repeat players absolutely have a process and there’s different flavors and each company has different places where different types of decisions either take place or which parts of the org are responsible for them. So there’s definitely a number of different ways to do it. But every deal is its own sort of perfect snowflake. They’re all snowflakes and so they’re deals and there’s unbelievable correlations from them and when you get into the granular, everyone is deciding ‘we’re going to make this happen,’ it becomes kind of a machine and the legal side and the diligent side starts to take on a life of its own and that really does happen. So I would say in general this is tough because on the outside particularly if you’re not going through a hardcore sort of auction process and a hired bank or whatever, but it’s a place where you sort of think, “Well, look. We're not really for sale but they seem to be interested so I’m open to doing this but I don’t want to sort of waste all my bandwidth and emotional energy in sort of exploring this and how we would do it.” So typically there’s usually an early meeting with someone in the business unit that’s responsible for the product area where there is the strategic interest and the overlap, and try to get an understanding for the product vision, the product technology, give maybe a bit of demo, a little early point of view on numbers. I think sometimes it can be tough to decide when do you share what. I think we’re always finding if an entrepreneur feels like they want to get an NDA in place before they share some financials and things like that, we tend to try to make sure that we kind of have checkpoints like if we get someone who’s trying to sort of take a read on the market because they’re about to do a fundraising around, they just figured they better think about it and they want to talk a handful of people that are sort of the logical fits for that business and say they decide we’re one of them and then sort of check in with us, we will oftentimes do at least one call without an NDA where we just sort of say ‘tell us the story and we’ll go through that. ’ So there’s sort of a high level business product check early on and then at some point you start to kind of have a feel for the financial side as well as you go through that. d we’ll go through that.’ So there’s sort of a high level business product check early on and then at some point you start to kind of have a feel for the financial side as well as you go through that. The biggest milestone you’ll find with large acquirers is kind of the LOI or the term sheet, and that almost always – and I truly mean almost always– includes a no-shop provision of some period of time. Typically, sort of 45-60 days, sometimes 30 days. Those are the types of things where once you get to that stage, you’ll have a lawyer involved and they can advise you what is “market”.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.