Scott Dorsey: belief

Transcript context

…So you go through this period of kind of from a dead IPO that wasn’t going to happen you pulled back, you raised a bunch of money at a time when nobody could raise money, you accelerated the business, and you go public in March of 2012. Then it’s just a little over a year later that the acquisition happened. The topic have I showed it – and we’ll get to category and tech themes and everything else in a minute – but I want to spend a little bit of time. We were talking with Scott before the show one of the things we love to do on Acquired is dig in to these court cases and SEC documents and all sorts of stuff. And luckily in ExactTarget’s case, I don’t think there are any major court cases, but one of the things that happens when a public company is acquired is they’re required – and this will be coming out for LinkedIn soon, I can’t wait to dive in – you’re required to disclose to the SEC a play-by-play of exactly how the acquisition happened. So then we’ll link to it in the show notes. It’s this amazing document about how the ExactTarget acquisition happened and l would love to just ask you to talk a little bit about that process of how it started and again, all of it is documented publicly like there were three other bidders that we can’t talk about their identities. They’re referred to as Party A, Party B, and Party C in the document. But multiple offers going back and forth, I mean that must have been such a stressful time for you. How did you navigate through? It was incredible. It was an incredible learning experience and exhilarating and nerve-racking at the same time for sure. So, we had been a public company for five quarters and life was good. We had a great time. Our IPO was super successful. We came out of the New York stock exchange at north of a billion dollar valuation and our IPO was heavily oversubscribed and we felt like we had all the right investors supporting us from day one. All that learning that happened in 2008 and 2009, we’re able to really apply to the S1 and filing process and IPO and how to pick the right banks and the right analysts. We had an amazing time going public and really loved it. Then five quarters as a public company, more of the same. We kind of met and exceeded plan every quarter. We were really embraced by Wall Street and had a great investor base. We had completed two acquisitions; one called iGoDigital in the predictive analytics space and a second, Pardot in the B2B marketing automation. And life was great. We were very happy as an independent public company and we were growing north of 40% year over year. What started to really happen across the kind of software ecosystem is that marketing cloud solutions started really garnering more attention and I would say really the largest probably five or six software companies in the world were really all shifting to the cloud and publicly stating an intent to go a lot deeper into marketing. So that started happening in a big way. For us at ExactTarget, a big part of our strategy had been to build a very open platform, robust APIs and lots of integrated partnerships. So, our premise was that marketers need one place to store all the data they have on their customers and then to use that data to drive more personalize and relevant communications and relationships. So, even literally before the AppExchange even existed, we integrated into Salesforce and we integrated into Microsoft Dynamics and we had great relationships with Adobe and Omniture and kind of many others across the industry. So it was very logical that we were attending shows and conferences and co-selling and co-marketing kind of with all these companies. But Salesforce, we’ve had this really rich relationship with from being a customer being an integrated partner to doing lots of things together in the market. We got to know Mark and the team. Salesforce had made a big push into marketing with the Radian6 and Buddy Media Acquisitions and really had a social first strategy. Over time, it just became apparent that their customers wanted more, that social was an important channel but they really wanted a multi-channel platform. They wanted greater data capabilities and they wanted a platform that was not only oriented for B2B customers but also B2C. al was an important channel but they really wanted a multi-channel platform. They wanted greater data capabilities and they wanted a platform that was not only oriented for B2B customers but also B2C. So, we always had a close relationship with Salesforce and we’d always kind of share product roadmaps and vision and direction and it just became apparent they were going to make a bigger investment in marketing and knocked on our door and said, “Hey, we’d like to collaborate and take a closer look at and kind of joining forces.” You’re absolutely right, David. When you’re a public company and you get that kind of inbound inquiry, the level of governance and process is at a very different level.…

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