Mergers and Acquisitions

Perhaps I’m stating the obvious, but one thing that I’ve noticed over the years (and have talked about extensively, particularly with Brad who very much shares this view) is that it’s much easier to have a company get bought than it is to sell a company. Getting bought means that someone comes to you. Selling means you go to them. The former results in a more motivated buyer, an easier (and faster) process for rounding up competitive bids and a higher price. The latter is a pain in the ass, tends to result in fewer options and generally a lower purchase price. When you are getting bought, you by definition have other options (since you don’t necessarily need to sell);…

I wrote a post about a month a go in my M&A series about drawing lines in the sand (see the original post here).  In it I argued that people negotiating m&adeals are too quick to dig in and make statements that they can’t/don’t intend to back up.  I was reading Ben’s blog today – his latest post references a HBS article on a similar subject that is worth a read.  Here’s the quote that Ben pulled from the article that pretty much sums up its contents.  When you look at the article pay attention to their point # 5 – it’s exactly what I was talking about in my earlier post. “In the classic game of Chicken, two drivers…

By now everyone has heard that Sun has agreed to acquire Colorado based storage company StorageTek. The press release was pretty ubiquitous, but if you haven’t checked out the presentation that accompanied it, it’s wroth skimming through here. Good for Sun . . . good for StorageTek . . . bla bla shareholders . . . bla bla convergence . . . bla bla network and data management. . . bla bla bla. Ok – with that out of the way I wanted to touch on a disturbing trend in the Colorado market, particularly in technology. We’re losing our CO based companies. The truly scary part is that we didn’t start out with many to begin with. This is a…

This is the second in a series of posts on the art of mergers and acquisitions. See the first post in the series here. I think the most important part of being an effective negotiator is not being a persuasive talker (although that is a skill that is helpful) – but rather being a very good listener. Its tempting to spend your time in a negotiation thinking about all the great points you can make and concocting elaborate strategies for getting your views across to the other party, but one can’t really do that and effectively hear what someone else is saying at the same time. The best negotiators spend the time when someone else is talking to listen intently…

Ernst and Young puts out a quarterly report on the VC industry.  It’s full of fantastic data (from their VentureOne group).  I just got my book today and am still sorting through it – I’ll put up a post soon with some of the take-aways. Something that struck me right away was the list of the top acquirers of VC-backed companies.  They are : IBM (5) Cisco (5) Tekelec (4) C-COR (4) Broadcom (4) Thomson (3) Motorola (3) IAC (3) Alcatel(3) Not surprising to see IBM and Cisco on the list.  I was surprised not to see Microsoft,  Mercury (both of whom seem to be pretty active acquirers)  and a few other names on the list (didn’t Siebel acquire 3…

I’ve been involved in executing mergers and acquisitions for a large part of my career. I’ve never stopped to count the number of deals I’ve been involved with, but would guess that the total is several hundred, with probably somewhere between 50 and 75 where I had primary responsibility for negotiating (the rest I was an advisor to). I’ve seen a lot of different types of deals over the years and many many different negotiating tactics (my own style varies from deal to deal, and my default style has changed a lot over the years – a topic for another post). Over the next few months I’m going to do a series of posts on m&a – some general comments…