Topics covered include:
- Brian’s history working across “both sides of the aisle” as both a startup founder and corporate development leader at a big company, how perspective from each informs the other, and the importance of learning “customer empathy”
- How Microsoft approaches M&A from an organizational perspective, and the importance of fit with the company’s product roadmap
- How Brian approaches strategic investments at Microsoft, and the evolution over time of the Microsoft (and large technology companies as a whole) perspective on investing in other companies
- Balancing the tension between partnering and investing, and what criteria Brian thinks about when evaluating companies
- Microsoft’s investment in Facebook in 2007 (at a then-crazy-seeming $15B valuation), and more recently Foursquare, Mesosphere, CloudFlare and others
- The current state of the tech M&A landscape, and the emergence of private equity as tech company acquirers
- Potentially changing corporate and foreign tax structures and how they impact acquirers’ thinking around deals (or not!)
- How Microsoft tracks and evaluates success of acquisitions over time, and lessons learned from successes and failures
- The increasing number of operating companies (technology and otherwise) looking to invest in startups, and how that landscape has evolved over time
Sponsors:
Koyfin: https://bit.ly/acquiredkoyfin
Statsig: https://bit.ly/acquiredstatsig25
ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acquiredsn
Followups:
- Snap Inc.’s rumored IPO filing — and bonus discussion of how VC’s and other investors think about “exiting” their investments in companies that have gone public
Hot Takes:
The Carve Out:
More Acquired!:
© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC
