David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…And the ones that are truly game changing for startups are few and far between. So it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do them. It just means you have to be pragmatic about what you should expect from them. So if there is a partnership you want, we oftentimes act as sort of a concierge into this wildly complex 15,000 person company which we sort of know how to navigate and from the outside it’s probably extremely hard to figure out who to get to if you want to talk about partnership around one particular product line. So we can definitely do that. But like I said, I think it's best oftentimes if it’s much more open-ended and it’s just, “Hey, we're in this space. We’d love to meet this VC that we both know. Thought we should get to know each other. Not looking for funding, not looking to sell but would love to grab coffee and just talk about what we’re doing.” It’s amazing as we're talking about this and even as we are preparing for the episode like how much this mirrors the process of raising venture capital too, which to be honest, it's an education for me. I never really thought about but we coach our companies when they’re thinking about racing around all the time. You’re always racing. You’re not always closing, but you’re always racing because it takes time to build relationships and VC investors, as you point, the Suster blog post is great about needing to invest in lines, not dots. Occasionally there will be a dot that is so compelling you have to invest in or it would seem for you guys, you have to buy. But it takes time to build these relationships. As you’re doing that, maybe talk a little bit about kind of the importance of culture and that relationship and the people fit? I know it’s something that’s really important to you and Adobe. How are you assessing that when you’re talking to entrepreneurs? I’d say Adobe, it’s uniquely important to us and we’ve walked away from extremely large deals north of a billion dollar because we didn’t feel like the culture fit was there. Part of it just has to do with how we think about what we’re doing and what we think has made us an enduring business over 30 years in a really dynamic space. The company has morphed from post script and printing tools and things like that into desktop publishing and then creative tools and now into marketing.…

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