Speaker unverified: belief

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…You talked about the qualities that you look for when you’re acquiring someone to be a culture fit. How does that impact the outcome of the acquisition? And is there anything specifically that you sort of look for as okay, this is going to make this outcome financially successful for Adobe because this person has X mindset? I think it's definitely related. I always say we don’t care about winning the press release. You create value and one of the reasons why value in companies is not science in a strategic acquirer scenario versus a private equity and whatnot is that look, even in private equities, this is really true if you get down to it, is that you’re valuation becomes because of a present value of your future cash flows. Like what drives what those future cash flows is what you actually go do in the market together. Inevitably, we’re not like a holding company that’s just going to buy great properties and let them roll. We’re trying to have a point of view around the market and say, “Hey, look. We can come together.” And maybe it’s not 1 and 1 equals 3, but there’s some sort of element of that overused word of synergy and we're looking for leverage and looking for a perspective that we can accelerate the vision of the entrepreneur but also frankly accelerate our own vision and hopefully even broaden it at times just as we did when we went from creative to marketing with the Omniture acquisition. So the reason it’s so important is that if you have an incredible strategy and an incredible vision, we all know it’s meaningless. It’s about execution. Big companies are no different than startups in that effect. Execution creates value. Strategy is what allows you have the opportunity to get into that mode. But you got to go do it. I think the one last thing – and we’ve touched on this a little bit when we were catching up before the call – is that to me, if I had to pick one hallmark that gives me a sort of good positive early indicator that we’re on the right track is when I start to see through the back and forth and comparing notes on the strategy and the vision that this concept of accelerating the entrepreneur’s vision around where they’re going is there but that’s not the only thing. The other thing is they actually start to embrace the broader vision that we have and say, “You know what, I actually think I can expand your vision and I want to get in. If I can work with you guys on that, I can do something bigger.” So oftentimes you’ll see over time that the deals that work really well and where it particularly works well for the founders or CEOs is where they end up loving the concept of getting inside a bigger company and maybe they’re really product people and all this raising money and also their stuff is part of what they have to do but it’s not what they love, and often they’re unleashed and they can just go do what they want and spend all of their energy there. Whether it’s here or to the smaller deals I did while I was at Yahoo, one was for a company called Citizen Sports – founder name is Mike Kerns. He founded that company with another guy named Jeff Ma who’s well known from Bringing Down the House days and all that from MIT. So Mike came in and just did phenomenally well. der name is Mike Kerns. He founded that company with another guy named Jeff Ma who’s well known from Bringing Down the House days and all that from MIT. So Mike came in and just did phenomenally well. And then another was a company called IntoNow that was founded and spun out by a guy named Adam Cahan. Those two guys stuck around Yahoo for – Mike just left about a year ago and I think Adam is still at Yahoo and they rose to be two of Marissa’s SVPs of Product. And these were smaller acquisitions so it’s not like they came in the door doing that. But they had a real passion for sort of online media and where it could go and sort of not just what they were doing with their product but what you could do if you applied some of the principles of social and mobile to the broader Yahoo business. We’ve seen the same thing here at Adobe and I think it's a classic sign that things will work out quite well.…

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