122. Rick van Esch, Managing Director, Sinch Engage - The Rollercoaster of SaaS Acquisitions!

In this episode, we speak with Rick van Esch, Managing Director, Sinch Engage, the Customer Communications Cloud that helps businesses deliver unified, personalized experiences no matter the channels they use. Over 150,000 businesses, including 8 of the 10 largest tech companies in the world, rely on Sinch for their customer communication needs.

We talked with Rick about how his company was acquired by Sinch back in the day and how he as a member of the Sinch team has gone on to do several other acquisitions. In particular, we are looking into the dynamics and the role of the acquirer vs the acquired in this process. Some of the questions covered were:

- Why it is important to know if you are a mercenary or a missionary acquisition?

- What are the key metrics to measure the success of an acquisition?

- Why does the bulk of the workload to integrate sit with the acquired company?

- Which are the most common pitfalls to avoid after the papers have been signed?

These are some of the many questions we address with Rick. Please tune in to learn about his 3 commandments when it comes to successful acquisition - both from the acquirer's and the acquired side.