Acquired - Episode 18: Special—An Acquirer’s View into M&A with Taylor Barada, head of Corp Dev at Adobe

Episode Date: August 22, 2016

Ben & David are joined by special guest Taylor Barada, VP and Head of Corporate Development & Strategic Partnerships at Adobe, to discuss how large tech acquirers approach buying companies. This episode is full of great insights for startups & entrepreneurs who might find themselves navigating the M&A process, as well as anyone curious about the craft of dealmaking and the strategic approach of large acquirers. Sponsors:ServiceNow: https://bit.ly/acqsnaiagentsHuntress: https://bit.ly/acqhuntressVanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta More Acquired!:Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodesJoin the SlackSubscribe to ACQ2Merch Store!Topics covered include: How conversations begin between startups and acquirersThe importance of building a relationship with acquirers over time and "investing in lines, not dots” (just like raising VC)The often under-appreciated role of culture fit between acquirers and acquisition targets How entrepreneurs should evaluate acquirers throughout the M&A process Two examples of successful acquisitions Taylor completed at Yahoo in Citizen Sports and IntoNowThe M&A process at large technology acquirers, from initial conversations to LOI, due diligence and the definitive merger agreement The relative roles of Corp Dev, business/product owners and executive sponsors in the M&A processCommon mistakes startups (and VC’s) often make in the M&A processDifferent “categories” of M&A that acquirers think about, and the relative risks & opportunities of “core" acquisitions vs transformative new businesses What percentage of deals Adobe looks at actually happen, and the importance of being willing to say noM&A as a tool for strategy, and the different M&A cultures & approaches at different companies Tech themes Taylor and Adobe think about as part of their M&A strategyEvaluating the longterm success of deals and the importance of the M&A integration function   Followups: Ben & David’s quick take on Instagram Stories!   The Carve Out: Ben:  Why the Concorde failed by VoxDavid: Simone Biles,  the greatest gymnast of all timeTaylor:  Mindset by Carol Dweck,  Shoe Dog by Phil Knight, Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam GrantNone this week… coverage of Instagram Stories to come next time!

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Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Welcome to episode 18 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today, we have a very special episode that kind of breaks the mold of the show. We had an opportunity that we absolutely couldn't pass up. And even though we're not covering a single specific deal, we think this is going to be a super, super interesting episode for listeners out there. So David, you want to tell them about our guests?

Yeah, we are lucky to be joined by a special guest today, Taylor Barada, who is the VP and head of CorpDev, CorpStrategy, and Strategic Partnerships at Adobe. So welcome, Taylor. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. Of course, quick background on Taylor. He joined Adobe in 2013. Before that, he was the VP of Business at Zynga. And before that, he was also relevant to our show, head of CorpDev at Yahoo. He has a JD MBA from Northwestern. And after Northwestern, spent a couple years at Bain before getting into the deal-making world. And perhaps most interestingly, you are the first guest on our show who is a former professional athlete.

Taylor played professional soccer or probably more accurately football in England. Maybe we'll get into that. Lots of deal making in that world. Yeah, exactly. No, I would say that looking back on it, I didn't have the language at the time, but there was no real US scene when I came out of college. And so effectively, I became an independent solo soccer entrepreneur. Had to go kind of figure out how to insert myself into the European game. And it was an amazing life experience, but not always the easiest. Yeah, man, that could be like a whole separate episode.

Probably not on this podcast, but I'm sure it's a cool story. So what we thought we'd do for this episode is kind of stick to our typical structure. But instead, as Ben mentioned of talking about one acquisition in particular, we just thought we'd use it as a vehicle to tailor get your insights kind of from the inside of being in corp dev and how you think about deals and acquisitions as you're going through them. So we have a bunch of questions, but I thought we'd start with sort of the acquisition history and facts section as usual. And I think the best way to kick off would be something that probably most of our listeners are curious about and I'm curious about, how do conversations typically start between corp dev and startups? Either when you're

approaching startups or when they're approaching you, what's the beginning of the story usually look like? Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I think you guys even doing this podcast and this focus is, I think, filling a nice gap and need because it's not something I spend a ton of time thinking about because at some point, it's just sort of natural and it seems very fluid and relationship driven and not some big moment of, you know, hey, we're for sale, although, you know, those things do happen. But yeah do happen. But it can be very sort of mystical and seem like this dark black art. And I find sometimes that entrepreneurs, when it feels that way, they tend to pull back and be very reserved

because they're not sure what they can and can't say, and they don't want to say the wrong thing, all of which is totally fair. And so on our end, what I've always done individually when I've been a deal lead and then what the culture I try to create on our group is that you remember that the process is fluid and it's hard to know which ones are going to actually go the distance and lead to a deal and which ones aren't. The Valley, as we all talk about in sort of the broader technology industry outside of the Valley, is incredibly small. And so because of that, it's very relationship oriented. And because of that, the way these conversations often start is just literally a connection and intro like, hey, you guys are in this space.

This company is doing interesting things. You know, you guys should just get to know each other. I've always liked after stumbling across it at some point in the last couple of years, Mark's sister's blog post on investing in lines, not dots. And, you know, I think his concept is, is that it's very hard to make a decision when you only have one point in time. But when you've had connections over time and you have the benefit of sort of seeing people say what they're going to go do and then hopefully go do it or something better, it develops credibility and you have time to sort of process and have a perspective on how it fits in. And so oftentimes it's as simple as that. We get introduced.

We sort of say, hey, you should, you should talk to someone. Um, there absolutely is the, the other sort of 20% case where some company has been going off in a space that we haven't been tracking or a company that we haven't necessarily focused on that decide they either get the stereotypical inbound strategic interest from someone else in the space. And they decide that they want to talk to others and see if they want to sell or they want to sell to us or frankly, sell to the highest bidder, that type of thing. And we'll get those calls, we'll take those calls, and we will sometimes do those. But that's a high bar. And we try hard to develop relationships so that sort of 80% of it is more

strategy driven, more relationship driven, and there's broader perspective and a broader context that's developed over a long period of time. Yeah. And in that original kind of introduction, when someone says, hey, you know, this company is a newer company, they're playing around in sort of a similar space or similar customer segment to you guys. What's the context for starting that relationship? Is it a partnership? Or is it just like, you know, let's not play any games, we sort of know that there might be some acquisition at some point in the future? Or, you know, what's the incentive for that entrepreneur to kind of start that conversation? Yeah, look, you can waste an enormous amount of time

if you just run around the valley talking to all the big companies, right? That's not your job. Your job is to build value for customers. And at some point, you're going to be able to monetize that value either through an IPO or the sale of the company. And with that as context,

I think sometimes you get into a scenario of like, and I've had introductions where a VC was an investor in a company, tried to make an introduction for us. And the entrepreneur told the VC who was on his board, like, why would I even take that meeting? I'm not trying to sell the company. You know that. And I've always found that kind of humorous because the whole point is, you know, it's like the old saying of, you know, when you want money, ask for advice. When you want, you know, advice, ask for money and that whole thing. It's like if you're like calling us asking to be sold, it certainly can happen. But, you know, if your first interaction is that, it puts an awful lot of weight on that interaction and doesn't need to be that way. And I think it also ignores the, the point, which I always make. Um, and when we sort of talk about it over time, as, as things develop, is that if you're smart as a seller, you should,

you're going to have a fiduciary duty to get the highest value you can for the business when it comes to that time. So that's just, that's just is. But at some point, once the deal takes place, you and the team will be working there. And so is it a place where you think your vision cannot just sort of go and get parked, but hopefully can be accelerated? And it's not an end as much as it is a beginning. Are they the type of people that you want to work with? Do they see the world the same way? Those things, sometimes you think, oh, that doesn't matter. We're just going to sell the highest bidder. It's like, yes, of course we get that. Everyone gets that. It doesn't mean that you should ignore all other stakeholders,

all other factors. The way you you sort of suss those out and frankly do diligence on us and other places and try to see whether it feels right is by getting to know people over time. So I actually think it's best when it's explicitly not around a specific conversation. It's certainly fine if there is a specific partnership that seems very interesting with a big company, but those also can be colossal wastes of time. Every small company thinks that every big company is the keys to the kingdom and a partnership with them will unlock everything. But oftentimes they take a very long time to get done. Once they're done, they take a very long time to mature.

And the ones that are truly game changing for startups are few and far between. And so it doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. It just means you have to be pragmatic about what you should expect for them. And so if there is a partnership you want, we oftentimes, you know, act as sort of a concierge into this wildly complex 15,000 person company, which we sort of know how to navigate. And from the outside, it's probably extremely hard to figure out who to get to if you want to talk about a partnership around one particular product line. So we can definitely do that.

But like I said, I think it's best oftentimes if it's much more open-ended and it's just, hey, we're in this space, would love to meet. This VC that we both know thought we should get to know each other and, you know, not looking for funding, not looking to sell, but, you know, we'd love to love to grab coffee and just talk about what we're doing. It's amazing. You know, as, as we're talking about this and even as we were preparing for the episode, like how much this mirrors the process of raising venture capital too, um, which, uh, to be honest, I mean, it's an education for me. I never really thought about that,

but we coach our companies when they're thinking about raising around, you know, all the time, you know, you're always raising, you're not always closing, but you're always raising because of this very, you know, it takes time to build relationships. And VC investors, as you point out, you know, the Schuster blog post is great about wanting to invest in needing to invest in lines, not dots. And occasionally, there'll be a dot that, you know, is so compelling, you have to invest in or it would seem for you

guys, you have to buy, but it takes time to build these relationships. What do you think, as you're doing that, maybe talk a little bit about the importance of culture and that relationship and the people fit. I know it's something that's really important to you and Adobe. How are you assessing that when you're talking to entrepreneurs? I'd say Adobe, it's uniquely important to us. And we've walked away from, you know, extremely large deals, you know, north of a billion dollar because we didn't feel like the culture fit was there. And part of it just has to do with how we think about what we're doing and what we think has made us an enduring business over 30 years in a really dynamic space. And, you know, the company has morphed from postscript and printing tools and things like that

into desktop publishing and then creative tools and now into marketing. And Photoshop itself was an acquisition a long time ago. Yes, yeah. Again, that's somewhat unique. And then my understanding was it was a couple guys and a product. But yes, the nascent piece was there and then they built around it how does that you know

you talk about um 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 like anything in specifically that you sort of look for as okay this, this is going to be, you know, this is going to make this outcome financially successful for Adobe because this person has X mindset. Yeah. I think it's definitely related. I mean, I always say, you know, we don't care about winning the press release. You know, you create value. And one of the reasons why valuing companies is art, not science in a strategic acquirer scenario acquirer scenario versus a private equity or whatnot, is that, look, and even in private equity, this is really true if you get down to it, is that your valuation comes because of a present value of your future cash flows.

What drives those future cash flows is what you actually go do in the market together. And 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 one and one equals three, 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, you know, creative to

marketing with the amateur acquisition. Excuse me. And so it's the reason it's so important is that if you have an incredible strategy and incredible vision, we all know it's meaningless. It's about execution. Like big companies are no different than startups in that effect. Execution creates value. Strategy is what allows you to have the opportunity to get into that mode. But you've got to go do it. And I think the one last thing, and, um, you know, we've touched on this a little bit when we were catching up before the call is that the, to me, if I had to pick one

hallmark that gives me a, uh, 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 it's not, 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. And if I could, if I could work with you guys on that, I can do something bigger. And 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 dyed in the wool product people and all this raising money and all this other stuff is part of what they have to do, but it's not what they love. And all of a sudden they're unleashed and they get to just go do what they want and spend all of their energy there. So whether it's here or two of the smaller deals I did

while I was at Yahoo, one was for a company called Citizen Sports, the founder named Mike Kearns. I founded that company with another guy named Jeff Ma who who's well known from the bringing down the house days and all that from MIT. But so Mike came in and just did phenomenally well. And then another was a company called Into Now that was founded and spun out by a guy named Adam Kahan. And those two guys stuck around Yahoo for, Mike just left about a year ago, and I think Adam's 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 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, you know, social and mobile to the broader Yahoo business. Um, and we've seen the

same thing here at Adobe. And I think it's, you know, I think it's, it's a classic sign that, uh, that things will work out quite well. It's a, it's really cool to hear you talk about that. We had in one of our early episodes, we had Kurt DelBene from Microsoft on and we talked about the Accompli acquisition. And he talked about this very fact that, you know, one of the things that Microsoft is thinking about now in terms of M&A

is just what you're talking about, about the people and the culture fit since Kurt's now leading the LinkedIn acquisition, but which is much bigger and more complex, but, but for Javier at Soltero at Accompli, you know, he's now running all of Outlook and exactly mirrored these themes. Let's move on. We, so we sort of break acquisition history and facts into two parts, you know, and my favorite part is sort of the stories of the acquisition sort of is what we've been talking about here. But I bet a lot of our listeners will be really curious about like, what's the process? You know, once you've realized that, you know,

there's a relationship here that could bear fruit, what is the what are the steps in the process when you're actually working through a deal at that point, you know, from LOI to term sheet to the definitive agreements? What are the key milestones for you guys? And what specifically are you looking for? Is it cool? Financial? Check. Cool.

There's no lawsuits against them. Check. Cool. Your product is growing with users. Check. Those sorts of things. Yeah. Look, you have to ultimately, you're going to do a deal, you know, if it makes, you know, strategic sense.

The technology product fit is there. And in the financials, you think makes sense for your shareholders. Right. And for us, the fourth one that I would put that over, you know, cuts across all of that is just the people that as we've already talked about. So the hard part about the deal is these are all even though we have a quote unquote process and every large acquirer that is is sort of a repeat player, right? And so all the places that I've been and done this role are definitely in that and you know, the other ones are people like you mentioned, so Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, etc. Repeat players absolutely have a process and there's different flavors and each company has different places where different types of decisions either take place or which parts of the org are responsible for them. So

there's definitely a number of different ways to do it. But it's, you know, every deal is its own, you know, sort of perfect snowflake. They're all snowflakes. So they're deals and there's unbelievable, you know, correlations from them. And when you get into the grain or, you know, everyone has decided we're going to make this happen, it becomes kind of a machine and the legal side and the diligence side starts to take on a life of its own. And that really does happen. So I would say in general, this is tough because on the outside, when you, particularly if you're not going through a hardcore sort of auction process and have hired a bank or whatever, but it's a, it's a place where you sort of think, well, look, we're not

really for sale, but they seem to be interested. So I'm open to doing this, but I don't want to sort of waste all my bandwidth and emotional energy and sort of exploring this. How would we do it? So typically there's usually an early meeting, you know, with a, someone in the business unit that's responsible for the product area. That's that where there is the strategic interest in the overlap, and trying to get an understanding for the product vision, the product technology, maybe a bit of a demo, a little early point of view on numbers. And I think sometimes it can be tough to decide when do you share what. And I think we're always fine if an entrepreneur feels like they want to get an NDA in place

before they share some financials and things like that. We, we tend to try to, um, make sure that we kind of have, have checkpoints. Like, you know, if we get, um, someone who's trying to sort of take a read on the market because they're about to do a fundraising round and they just figure they better think about it and they want to talk to a handful of people that are sort of the logical, um, fits for that business and say they decide we're one of them and then you know sort of check in with us you know we will oftentimes do at least one call without an NDA where we just sort of say you know tell us the story and we'll go through that so there's sort of a high level business product check early on and then at some point you start to kind of have a feel for the financial

side as well as you go through that. The biggest milestone you'll find with large acquirers is kind of the LOI or the term sheet. And that almost always, and I truly mean almost always, includes a no-shop provision of some period of time, typically sort of 45 to 60 days, sometimes 30 days. Those are the types of things where once you get to that stage, you'll have a lawyer involved and they can advise you what is quote-unquote market. Just like a venture financing. It's funny how they parallel. Yes, you're going to have your lawyer and they're going to be able to tell you what's market.

They'll educate you on what the business ramifications are of what is being done. Every big company has slightly nuanced ways of doing things. And because we are repeat players and the lawyers are repeat players, there's certain things where, you know, it's basically like, yeah, we're not, you know, we're not going to do that because of the precedent of it and that type of thing. So oftentimes those are, but they, you know, depending on, you know, where the leverage lies, depends on how much those things get negotiated by the buyer or the seller. Again, exactly like a venture round in that respect. And then once you get through that, that's when you see the circle of knowledge on both sides expand, but particularly on the buy side, sometimes it can be overwhelming because then we're going to jump in and do a day minimum, oftentimes two or three days

of kind of a deep dive, take us through the business beginning to end in terms of go through the product, go through the go-to-market, go through the financials, go through the operations, go through the technology architecture, et cetera. And then, you know, that's when you build out a very detailed data room. And, you know, I think with the super early stage companies, sometimes you'll run into some issues where, you know, they didn't have their house in order, they didn't get good legal advice early enough on, and, you know, maybe they were working with a couple of outside agencies and they didn't have them sign an invention assignment agreement that type of stuff like those are at this point the i saw that more 10 years ago than i do today i think the the breadth

of you know startup legal advice and sort of you know smart experienced angels as well certainly the venture community you just people tend to have a pretty buttoned up shop, particularly if they're venture backed and, um, and things are pretty clean. But if you're outside of the Valley and maybe the company was lucky enough to grow, you know, bootstrapped or whatever, and they kind of just made all work every now and then you'll run across things where they didn't have their house in order. And then it's, it's rarely a deal killer, but it usually is end up being something you got to sort of work around. So you drive through that at some point you put in place a, um, definitive agreement where, you know, our lawyers will put together, uh, an acquisition agreement, um, depending on if it's

a share purchase or an asset purchase, uh, et cetera. And, um, and you kind of go back and forth on that and, um, you know, try to get it finalized and ultimately deal deals are announced once the definitive agreement has been signed. And then there's a question of is it a simultaneous sign and announce and close, meaning, you know, we signed it, we sent the money, we own it? Or is there a split sign and close where, you know, we sign it, we announce it, and then there's 30 days to meet XYZ closing conditions before, you know, we would actually close. You'll see both. Yeah, and you mentioned throughout all these steps, there was one point in there where the business owner

talks with the company they're acquiring and compares vision and strategy and digs in with corp dev. How involved is the business owner throughout that entire process? Are they in every single meeting? Are they in that first meeting? Is it the business owner throughout that entire process? Are they in every single meeting? You know, are they in that first meeting? Is it the business owner that first contacts that company? What is their role? And what is the role of corp dev throughout the entire acquisition process? Yeah, it's critical. So I mean, one thing to know is you can't ignore corp dev. In many ways, they're going to be your guide and your partner throughout this. And I truly view it

as a much more collaborative thing. If you're going to get a deal done eventually, it's going to be because everyone thinks it makes sense and you're able to get together at a valuation that everyone feels good about. So I very much try to make it clear to people and make sure that our deal leads make it clear that no one can quote unquote make you do anything you don't want to do. So that is one thing I think out of the gates to kind of demystify the whole process and take a little pressure off. The relationship with the business owner is critically important.

I mean, in the language I use, and again, every company has sort of slightly different ways of thinking about this, but I think of it as there's an executive sponsor and there's a business owner. Oftentimes you will see, particularly if a company's kind of got some VC intros and things like that, they will be really focused on like trying to get in to meet the CEO or get to meet the, you know, the head of the whole business unit. I've never been guilty of that. Yeah. And like, and it's fine. Everyone gets it. It's the old thing of coming high and work down and blah, blah.

Sometimes it can be fine. Other times it can be either off-putting or even counterproductive in that if you get in front of them too early before the business owner and corp dev have been able to kind of frame it and and suss out in combination with you sort of your business well enough that then we can effectively translate and help people understand why this is exciting why this matters they might take one meeting and be like eh i wasn't that interested and then and then it creates this uphill battle where corp dev and the business owner are like no no no no no we got to spend a little more time on this this one's interesting right and so trusting out it's so true so even if you've got like this perfect hey my venture guy says he is like golfing buddies

and best friends with the ceo or whatever right it's it's just a card you, I generally just sort of say, play it straight up, play it open, and then treat the corp dev person and the business owner as people that are your partners to figure out whether this makes sense. Not, you know, not someone who you got to kind of like micromanage the thing. Because ultimately, it's not like a enterprise software sort of sass you're going into an it group they've got a need for a widget you've got a widget you're going to sell them on wise yours is the best and then you know wham we're done like get it done right it just it's it's a it's a it's a very subtle collaborate collaborative dance where where both sides are evaluating each other and getting to know each other. And you can't, I mean, it's sort of overblown to say it's a marriage, but look, you're selling your baby that you put heart and soul into creating.

You want to find out if we're good stewards of it, if our visions align, and you should care about this. It's so funny going back to the parallels with venture. I mean, it just keeps coming up. But like, we see companies make this mistake with us all the time is, you know, they come in, they meet with one partner. And, you know, that relationship is progressing at a natural pace. And then, you know, in the worst case, the founder CEO or but oftentimes one of the other venture backers or somebody will come in and talk to another partner and it's called we call it partner shopping and like nothing will kill a deal faster than that yeah yeah and there's less issue

with that here because we're not a partnership there's a there's a natural organizational structure to a big company but you're still going to somebody i think has influence but actually has no context on the relationship and back to that being the most important thing can totally see how that can blow up deals yeah exactly it really blows up deals and that's the most important thing. I can totally see how that can blow up deals. Yeah, exactly. It really blows up deals. And that's the other thing why I say there's almost no misstep that you can't get over if actually it makes business sense.

Right. And that's the other reason why I say getting people in the mind space of like, you're building a great business. You're going to get the exit you deserve and we're looking for a collaboration to figure out whether we're the right home for it. It takes all the pressure off because the real answer is you don't need to micromanage and overmanage it. We do this all the time and if

we're approaching it with that mindset, we're going to together to figure it out. Because the biggest reason people do that is because they're in value optimization mode. In the back of their mind, they think, I got to maximize value. And it's like, yeah, totally. It is literally in the bylaws. It's your fiduciary responsibility, right? And we get it. And so it's part of that.

But if you overmanage that and overplay it at the wrong times, it comes across awkward. And again, if it actually makes sense, you're probably going to recover from it. So even if you do, it's not that big a deal. Like I said, I like, I've never not done a deal, but I've had deals where it was much harder to get there because, you know, we, someone figured out some way to get in front of either the CEO or some, you know, some other head of a business unit or something earlier than we probably would have ideally wanted. Or sometimes it comes in that way, and that's fine too. But then it's like, you know, people got to do their job.

To bring that whole thread back around to the core question that you asked, I think it was Ben, the business owner or that sort of head of product is actually an extremely important relationship as well. Like you should have a sense of where, you know, if you were king for a day and ran that business, where would you think that, you know, the startup that you run fits in? And then how do you figure out who's responsible for that part of the business? And that's absolutely just as important a relationship. I would never say, you know, only focus on that relationship and ignore corp dev, but I would also never say focus on CorpDev and don't worry about that relationship. You kind of have to have both. And sometimes, again, it's, this probably also is like the venture, it's very organic and wherever you have an in, you know, in a warm intro, take the warm intro and then ask the questions of, you know, hey, should I talk to someone in CorpDev or whatever? I have business unit partners who are very sophisticated, have sponsored deals many times. And part of the job of being a good product manager, let alone a business unit product

owner or GM, is understanding the outside market and knowing the ecosystem that you're in. So they should be out there meeting startups and stuff. So oftentimes, they will meet someone and they'll hand it off and say, you know what? I've met with this guy once or twice for coffee. I kind of like where he's headed. You should like nothing to do here.

I'm not looking to do it. He's not looking to sell, but I just kind of want to get him on CorpDes radar. Can you meet with them? That type of thing. Other times we're, you know, we've partnered with the business unit to develop a strategy and, um,

overall, and we kind of know the spaces that we're sort of particularly interested in, we'll find a relationship or a company and we'll get intros and we'll pass them through. I think that is one difference between the VC and M&A world is that sourcing is not some big magical thing. You know, we, every now and then we'll find something that we didn't expect because we've made an extra effort to get out and beat the bushes. But we're out there in the market. There's only so many acquirers.

People will find us nine out of ten times. If you're lucky as a VC firm, you also are in that position. Most of us aren't that lucky. All right, listeners. Our next sponsor is a new friend of the show, Huntress. Huntress is one of the fastest growing and most loved cybersecurity companies today. It's purpose built for small to midsize businesses and provides enterprise grade security with the technology, services and expertise needed to protect you. They offer a revolutionary approach to managed cybersecurity that isn't only about tech, it's about real people providing real defense around the clock. So how does it work? Well, you probably already know this, but it has become pretty trivial for an entry-level hacker to buy access and data about compromised businesses. This means cybercriminal activity towards small

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by customers in the G2 rankings as the industry leader in endpoint detection and response for the eighth consecutive season and the industry leader in managed detection and response again this summer. Yep. So if you want cutting-edge cybersecurity solutions backed by a 24-7 team of experts who monitor, investigate, and respond to threats with unmatched precision, head on over to huntress.com slash acquired or click the link in the show notes. Our huge thanks to Huntress. The next category that we talk about on the show is acquisition category. And so every deal that we look at, we assign, we say, you know, was this a product acquisition or a business line acquisition or a people acquisition?

We're curious on your end, like, do you guys do the same thing or is it more organic? Like as you're looking at different companies and then they tend to fall. Like, are you guys thinking like, yep, this is definitely an acqui-hire or like, oh, this could be like a huge business line acquisition or, you know, how is that going through your heads? Yeah, I mean, look, there's industry store standard lingo, you know, acqui-hires, tech and talent deals, you know, like, you know, whatever sort of business acquisitions or product acquisitions. Those types of things are definitely, I've heard those used. We've used those all the time. We don't get too hung up on it. One construct I've used inside of our business is from my Bain days, I had a respect for

some of the profit from the core analysis. And there was actually a book written a number of years ago called Profit from the Core. And they'd done analysis of like 2,000 companies and growth initiatives, both M&A and otherwise. the most enduring from a perspective of, you know, who is the customer? What's the channel of the market? What's the geography you're playing in? What's the business model and what's the product? Anytime you change one of those five things, you're like a one step adjacency further from the core and it creates risk.

And actually they showed through analysis of all these different companies that, you know, once you got, I think it was one step adjacency was maybe about a 30 to 40% chance of success. But once you got out, like three or four of those things changed, you dropped off to like 10% chance of success. It doesn't mean that you don't take, you know, things that are multi-step adjacencies because sometimes those are where the biggest opportunities are, but you have to make sure that they're worth the risk. Otherwise, you're just leading to sort of undisciplined diversification and you have no better chances of success than just, you know, a private equity investor or holding company and probably less because it's not really how your

business has been set up to focus, you know, the resources of the company on. Something like Omniture, we've gone back and looked at that in hindsight, and that was probably a four-step adjacency in many ways. It was SaaS, a completely new product. It was an enterprise selling motion, which we didn't have in mature fashion at that point. And the business model in terms of recurring revenue was new because we hadn't moved to that with the creative side of the business we it was after that that we moved from creative suites creative cloud so that was a in hindsight a very risky

big bet yeah but it was a large big business that had was the market leader had real momentum and so you could make that bet and then if you you know focused on the rest of the things that you could control you know it's ended up being a $2 billion plus it's on the road to being more than that business force and so it's not that you don't do those things but you do them for the right reasons and so as you think about that things that are in your core, meaning we're already in that part of the business that's where we're more in that part of the business,

that's where we're more likely to look for, you know, some tech and talent, you know, smaller kind of deals. Or we look for like a little bit of a core expansion where it's kind of like a one step, you know, adjacency where maybe we get a new product with a bit of a business around that's been proven in the market, but it's not scaled yet. We bring that in and we scale it. The marketing cloud in many ways, after the amateur acquisition, there were a number of other add-on acquisitions that were done to broaden out the product portfolio and then sell through the same channel. In the enterprise space in particular, you know, true, you know, large scale enterprise sales force. And the companies that have done that, that's such an

unbelievably huge investment over, you know, like probably a decade to get there, that then it's a question of, you know, how do you maximize the throughput of that channel every year? And so finding additional products to put in the salesperson's bag is a big part of it. So on the B2B sort of enterprise side, that's a big deal. On the consumer side, it's a slightly different element in terms of particularly all the networks and everything with the social networks and platforms we've seen have changed the dynamics there a bit. But historically, that was a little bit of Yahoo's original strategy was, okay, we have this portal.

Let's just keep adding on things, right? That was before my time at Yahoo. But it was, you see the approach driven by the business strategy. And I think that's, at Adobe, that's in my personal sort of belief is that it has to be a strategy driven process. And so the categorization of what you're going after is driven by what you're trying to accomplish strategically. Cool, cool, cool. Moving on to our next segment, we always talk about what would have happened otherwise. And it's the part where

we try and figure out, you know, if this deal didn't go through, whether other acquirers or, you know, would that company have grown on their own? And I feel like a good question to kind of dive into there is what percentage of deals that you look at actually end up happening? Yeah, it's very low. I mean, very low. And it's a question of what look at means, right? Yeah.

You know, we've historically done sort of four to 10 plus deals a year. I mean, I think actually the market strategy is our, our, our sort of strategic umbrella is big enough to do meaningfully more than that, but we've kind of intentionally focused on a strategy that says, we, you know, we're going to make, we're going to make sure that the ones we do are going to work. And, and Adobe's, I mean, I've, we've had bankers come in and be like, what are you guys doing? How do you do it? And because everyone around the Valley is sort of saying that, you know, the ones you're doing seem to be working. And I think a lot of it is just a willingness to say no. And that starts at the top.

And we have a CEO, Shantanu Narayan, who I describe as having founder level passion for. He's been here 19 years, he's been CEO nine, um, you know, no different than a founder who, who just feels it in their bones and feels that level of passion for protecting the mission and the vision and, you know, that we're going after. And, um, what that means is it's a very high bar on what makes it through the Rubicon of strategy, fit tech, fit team fit, financial expectations, et cetera. And so you have to be willing to say no in order to make sure that you get the right ones. You have to be careful that that doesn't make you risk averse and not moving quick enough and fast enough. But I wouldn't even know how to put a percentage on it, but I would probably say

sub 10%. A lot of things have to align to make a deal happen both on both the seller and the buyer side. You know, so you're probably looking at plus or minus a thousand inbounds a year. I mean, we probably get two to five emails a day with, Hey, would you be interested in checking this out? That sort of thing. And there are a lot of those, a lot of those. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those, the answers, and it's probably, again, no different than VC. For us, it's just like, Hey, that's not a fit, but appreciate you thinking of us. And we try hard to give quick answers and quick no's if, if we just don't think it's, it's worth it. And we don't window shop. You know, if we take a meeting, it's because we think it could be interesting.

That's awesome. And that's a great lead.. The next segment that we usually do is tech themes where we look around and we try and figure out, you know, what technology themes or themes in the industry and the world does this represent to you? And I think a really good kind of twist on themes here is, what, you know, how have you tackled M&A differently at the different companies you've been at? And how have you guys, you know, how to how is how have you tackled M&A differently at the different companies you've

been at? And how have you guys, you know, taken a different kind of strategic or organizational approach between each one? Yeah, again, M&A is a tool. I mean, you know, I've always joked that if if I ever do something noteworthy enough that requires a memoir at some point. And this stuff makes it in, it would be like, it's not about the deal. Right. It's that would be, you know, there's the whole book with Lance Armstrong back in the day. It's not about the bike. It's like, it's not about the deal.

I mean, the deal itself is mechanical. And if, if, if you love that world and there's people who do, and frankly, it's, it's a fascinating fun world on a lot of levels. If you love that world, I mean, those are the folks that end up in banking. And I have tons of respect for those guys because I think their jobs are really, really hard and they only get paid if things get done. And then they oftentimes get a bad rap. And I think there's a lot of great ones out there. But it's just a tool. And so the question is, what is your strategy? If you sort of tie that back to your core question of like how are things a little bit different at different companies

um i'd say at yahoo um we were going in a lot of different directions when i got in there we were because it was 08 09 um when i when i, you know, there was a little, I found at times things were bubbling up, bottoms up in terms of people being entrepreneurial and trying to get things going at the business level, business unit level. Um, and there wasn't, um, we were going through, it was kind of a restructuring and there wasn't as much of a clear, Hey, we got to go do this tops down. And then you, you would get the inevitable, Hey, we got a call and supposedly Google's looking at buying this. And I was like, so like, that's not a strategy, like doing what your competitors are doing is not a strategy, right? So we, we spent time around getting

alignment around strategy. We spent time around locking in the concept of from a process perspective of an executive sponsor so that, so that you got the alignment early, tops down on strategy. And then it made sure that when we were spending time on things, it tied to that. But frankly, I mean, Yahoo had a reputation. We worked hard on this, but it was just a little bit of the reality at some point of the culture was, you know, we had a reputation for being a little bit slow. And so we tried hard to make sure that we were transparent with entrepreneurs around the different hoops and stuff we were going to have to jump through together so that they could feel in control of it.

And we could feel like we were in it together instead of it just feeling like this monolithic bureaucratic thing. And it wasn't that, but it was just a nature of sort of how things got done and that culture and sort of where they were. And the culture of the company affects the process. At Zango, I mean, we had, the company had been founded like three years before. I mean, Mark's incredibly aggressive, dynamic entrepreneur. If he believed it made sense and we could convince him that we could go do it. So, I mean, I remember working on a deal and, you know, we found out that some entrepreneurs had spun off from one company that we thought was interesting and gone and done something else. And you could just tell from talking to the guy that had been left behind was that the real creative juice had walked out the door.

And so it was basically like you got off the phone and it was like being in a movie. I was like, find those guys. And so someone on the team got them, someone on the team got them on the phone. We literally like two hours later we had them on the phone and Two hours later, we had them on the phone. I was like, can you come to San Francisco tomorrow?

They were like, no. Are you crazy? I was like, great. We'll be there at 1 o'clock. We hopped on a plane and went down. It was fun because you felt like you were going to go make it happen immediately. It was that type of time in that company. And from a strategy perspective, we were trying,

we had the sort of tiger by the tail in terms of, you know, what was happening with social and everything. We knew the categories that we needed to add from a social gaming perspective. You needed to find the teams to go do them because we didn't have enough people in-house to do it. It was that type of voracious growth. And so it made strategic business sense to try to move that fast. And part of it was just, again, the culture at the top. It's just, look, I guess my point is the culture of the company, the strategy of the company, where it is in the arc of its growth will define what process it creates and how it goes about it. and then also what it sort of means.

And, you know, at Adobe, we have these bigger arcs that we're working against. And, you know, from a corporate strategy perspective, what we've been focused on for several years are sort of three big trends. One is, as I sort of say, everyone in both the consumer and the enterprise side has been dealing with, it's just this unbelievable wave of mobile. And like, you know, how do you get it to the point where it's truly a tailwind? There's only a handful of companies I think have really cracked the code. Facebook, the pivot they did, and I was there at Zynga when they were trying to figure that out. And neither one of us

really had it working for us. They figured out how to make it work for them. And I was there at Zynga when they were trying to figure that out. And neither one of us really had it working for us. They figured out how to make it work for them. And, you know, it really took their business to another height. And it's like every year when Mary Meeker, now at Kleiner Perkins, formerly Morgan Stanley, comes out with that internet report. And that there's that slide where she shows the percentage of time spent on the internet shifting to mobile and every year it like outpaces the trend line from the year before and it's like how do you get it to the point where that's truly a tailwind so that that is just naturally making your business you know exceed expectations so that was one it's like make mobile a tailwind across our entire business second was it's obvious when you look at the consumer internet that the last

10 years have been around unlocking network effects, right? Through social networks, marketplace, business models, platform, business models. Um, there's a interesting, um, opportunity, I think in the, in the sort of SaaS based enterprise to look at unlocking similar network effects. And the way you do that is by making data and content like really strategic assets. And historically, enterprise software has largely been, you know, we're tools, you know, we'll sell you a tool and you do whatever you want with that tool. Whereas consumer platforms look at data and content as the strategic assets that are sort of theirs. And there's a hybrid approach that I think you're starting to see emerge

in B2B businesses as well, where customers certainly have their own data, but they blend it with network level data from the technology providers as well. And so those are some big trends that we've been openly pursuing and really sort of came from outside in analysis of what was happening,

not just in our own space, but actually was happening across the broader landscape, including the consumer, um, world that I'd sort of seen at Yahoo and Zynga. Yeah, that's great. It's really cool. The, uh, the kind of next section before, I guess our last section before we, uh, we do carve outs is, um, the, the conclusion. And this is where we decide, you know, usually just David and I, did this acquisition go well? Do we call it an A, like Instagram, or, you know, on down the line? Hard to argue with that one.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Do you guys have any kind of internal process where you look back or even just isolated examples of, like, what you look for and success metrics of, yes, that was a good acquisition and we should do more things like this. So one of the things that our team's responsible for under me is is the M&A integration function. And I've always felt like that's a critical to be combined in the same group because otherwise it breeds a behavior that sort of feels like, hey, we're just responsible

for banging out the deal. It doesn't matter if you throw it over the wall and someone else will integrate it, that type of thing. I always, myself, have thought of the job as a growth job. It just happens that a deal is part of it. And you have to partner with the entrepreneur and partner with the business owner and sort of be CEO of that growth opportunity until someone else can truly take the mantle

that will be responsible for running that business. And if you think about it that way, there's little things where you put a little extra amount of care and attention into things like retention packages. And even though the entrepreneur is telling you that this person is critical, you're actually sensing that maybe that's more for historical reasons, and they don't understand that in a bigger company once they're inside this person who's been their right hand person from an operational perspective there's like three other functions that are going to serve that purpose for them and they're actually less important so you kind of underweight you sort of talk to them and

collaborate to figure out how actually you want to maybe reward them more at the time of the deal but actually put a little more retention for someone else that's going to, their importance is going to go up post-acquisition, those types of nuances. If you're not focused on the integration when you're doing the deal, you just do things differently. And so that's important. And so by having the integration function in there, we make sure that they're in our weekly meetings and that we share learnings and it's sort of part of the culture. So to me, it starts with culture inside the group, which is, you know, it's a growth leader, um, function, not kind of a deal function. So that's one, um, from a formal sort of postmortem evaluation process. We commit to reporting out to our CEO and CFO as well as the

board every year, every quarter. We do a report for two years after a deal that reports against basic key value drivers and metrics. As you might imagine, there's a financial one, there's a product one, there's sort of employee retention, depending on sort of how many people we're trying to retain that type of stuff. And excuse me, we try to make sure that, you know, we're being hard on ourselves and, you know, not just greens across the board, but we're being honest about, you know, where things are sort of yellow and red. And, um, every once in a while we'll do a more formal deep dive post-mortem if something hasn't gone well. Nothing ever – these things are really hard.

And as I alluded to earlier with the statistics from the profit from the core, I always joke that in general, you know, this is not NBA free throw shooting. It's much more Hall of Fame baseball hitting, you know, meaning for those that aren't sports fans, you know, it's not 70, 80, 90%. It's probably plus or minus, you know, 30% is not all bad. And our track record at Adobe is actually, you know, dramatically higher than that. Every now and then it's like you make lemonades out of lemons where things didn't work out like you expected them to. But you had the right team and the culture fit and the product to build from, and you went in a slightly different direction. And that's okay too, right? And that goes back to why culture fit is important. It says if things go wrong and the market plays out differently, you can still create value. There are definitely

companies that have meaningful hundreds of millions of dollar bets that are effectively swing and misses and complete write downs. And we haven't had that. And I think a lot of it has to do with the culture of focusing on thinking about the long range before you even do the deal. So the postmortem and evaluation is important, but it's more the fact that you know you're going to be doing it and you know that that's what we all care about. And that's what sort of changes the upfront.

I love that as a, as a way to wrap it too, that culture is what's going to drive. It's interesting to think about back to this analogy with venture, like the happiest day of the next two years of your company is going to be when you close that round like and then the real hard work starts and you know it's um it's the entrepreneurial drive that's going to keep founders engaged when um you know life is is quite challenging and um and i'm sure that's the same you know after an acquisition inside the company and kind of gets back to, um, if it's not the right culture fit, you're not going to have that drive to keep going. A hundred percent. And, and it can be sad too, because you see it where,

I mean, entrepreneurs who sell something and it doesn't fit and it ends up withering on the vine or being killed or dies inside a big company, you meet those guys later or women, it's like they can't be more bitter. Something they poured their life into they feel wasn't respected and honored and whatnot. And sometimes the market plays out differently and they get that and that's that. But if a big company through bureaucracy or missteps or lack of culture fit or whatever, you know, destroys the labor of love that every startup is, that's just such a tragedy, right? And yet

in turn, the legacy that accrues to the founder when something is phenomenally successful post-acquisition is enormous. And you see that, right? And so that's why I think the fit and people being aligned and going about things the same way just matters so much. Because what you said um about that kind of moment in time hey celebrate it you got the money in the bank um and then when you do us selling the company it's literally it's not just the money in the company's bank it's usually the money in the entrepreneur's bank account so it's worth celebrating it's awesome it's amazing

we always love to celebrate with them but it's like that's why we test so much of the country thing is like yeah it's day literally it's day one it's the beginning not the end and if you aren't fired up about that by the way it's okay if you're not you just got to be honest about it early on because if you try to pretend like oh yeah i'm in it for the long haul i'm so excited this vision it's like we'll figure that out and then you piece like that's when you're going to be better, right? You can't fake passion. Yep. Totally. So true. And so many walks of life. Um, let's move on real quick. Uh, we do have a followup. We want to make sure we cover this week, uh, that I will just mention briefly, but, uh, Instagram. So, uh, Taylor, one of the things we do is, um, if something new happens, uh, on one of the deals we've covered in the past, we call it out on the show.

And in this case, relevant to two episodes we've had in the past, Instagram launched Stories. So we covered Instagram as one of our early shows. And then we covered Facebook's failed acquisition of Snapchat. And super interesting to watch what's happening with instagram stories yeah i don't want to dive too much into this because it's not not the dedicated episode for it but um you know facebook is very scared of snapchat snapchat doesn't have the global penetration that facebook does so there's you know plenty of of uh opportunity to defend international turf there but they very well should be afraid of snapchat because of the the engagement that they're getting and and the kind of it's the first place that that

people check and where a lot more activity happens in instagram and it's really interesting to see facebook after having some failed attempts to launch facebook branded platforms to disrupt uh snapchat others yep uh instead saying you know? All these kids are already on Instagram. Even though Instagram's about that one perfectly curated crafted photo, let's see if we can throw this completely other paradigm into this and see if Instagram can be the one hub for that

generation. This might merit a future episode. If you want to hear that, let us know on email or Slack. But let's move on quickly to carve outs um taylor did uh uh do you want to go first absolutely so the the my three most recent reads i i'm by the way i read constantly i'm i'm sort of my my family and my my wife is definitely much more of a purger and i think if i moved entirely to a kindle she'd be happy. But I tend to not only like to read books, but then sort of see them around the house.

It just kind of makes me happy. I grew up in one of those households. And so it's just part of life and part of sort of embracing everything that's out there to be learned. And I feel like you can never have enough time to get through them all. But the three most recent ones I've read and actually loved all three one was mindset by carol dweck which talks about the the growth versus fixed mindset and just phenomenal and like look the basic concept you can you can embrace and understand in 30 seconds you know it's the concept of are you approaching life you know with this feeling that everything is fixed

and you just got whatever talents you were given in life and that is what it is and you have to sort of expose those but you don't have a chance to grow. Or do you believe that actually you have what you have but it's basically irrelevant and the question is what are you going to grow towards through hard work and effort? And what was fascinating about reading the book is when you describe it the way you just did, anyone who's sort of an ambitious type A entrepreneur or like those of us on this podcast are, I'm sure, thinking, well, I'm a growth person. I'm always trying to get better and it's great. And I read this book and it was very humbling to sort of realize that in some parts of your life, you were completely growth oriented. In other ways, you had intrinsically and sort of had this concept of a fixed mindset that, oh, well, I just, I have talent in that or I don't.

And so thinking deeply about that for yourself, for your kids, if you're a parent, for your team, if you're a leader, I thought was incredibly powerful. Yeah. Wow. I was having drinks with a friend the other night and he asked me, so are you more of a routine person or are you flexible to do whatever? And it was so interesting that in the work that we do at Pioneer Square Labs, we're super flexible. If it's like, hey, you got to fly down to LA in two days because the opportunity for this company is to meet with someone there, doing that. Or if it's your marketing today or your product today, all over the place and schedule changes all the time. But in my personal life, I need to wake up at the same time and have

the exact same morning routine every morning or else I'm not myself. And it's amazing how different we can be in different aspects of our lives. And we think of ourselves as either a routine person or a growth person or whatever it is. And it's not necessarily unilateral across the board. Yeah, no, totally. That actually, I mean, that makes me think of another one, which, you know, if you're, if you're exploring all the podcasts and this one is, is I think literally you're near the top of the charts, but I've definitely been enjoying Tim Ferriss's one. And I think his focus on routines and the questions around morning routines and stuff just fascinates me because I'm probably, there's things where I'm somewhat routine oriented, but there's a lot of things

where I rebel against it and don't want to commit to an absolute strict routine. And because I kind of like the dynamic that you described of like being ready for the most important thing and hop on the plane and, you know, go do that. And it's fascinating to sort of think about how important routines and systems are to success. That's another one I would flag. Before I turn it over, I'll just flag the other two. The second would be Shoe Dog about Phil Knight from Nike and unbelievable entrepreneurial journey and just an incredibly revealing memoir that I've really just found illuminating, inspiring and awesome. But it also, to me, you know, for you, for, for you, David, on the venture side, it will give you,

you will come away reading this book, you'll feel like, like you're doing God's work because I think we, I think we underestimate how we, this concept that, that capital is almost available from anywhere. And that, you know, you guys in the venture community, and actually I have Adobe ventures under me as well. So we, we, we do this here and there is that, you know, where it's like, we're competing to be the ones who provide capital to the right businesses or whatever. And it's's like there was this point in time where like businesses that you know are now like changing the world literally couldn't get capital it's just insane like reading the story and i'm not talking about a short period of time like for like i can't remember like seven eight almost 10 years he was like on a shoestring and like trying to get these bank loans it was just

crazy it just it was it blew your mind. So it was, uh, that was, that one was phenomenal. David is doing God's work. Let's be clear. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, and then the last would be originals by, um, by Adam Grant. Um, and, uh, you know, that was just, you know, sort of focusing in on creativity and what are the hallmarks of people and how do they go about that and how do you be original and who are the originals

and stuff as I said I think one of the fun things about software and internet is it gives a lot of clay for all of us to play with and you can absolutely be an original if you if you want to go be so uh those three were those three have been a lot of fun the last uh the last probably even two or three weeks i've kind of churned through all of them that's

awesome the originals uh i hadn't heard of that i have to add it to my list yeah um maybe i'll go next real quick uh because it picks up on a couple of those themes from a from a disparate angle we we started the episode on a sports topic so i can't end it on one i can't not end it on one given that it's the olympics right now and my carve out is if you haven't seen everybody's got to go watch simone biles the women's gymnast i mean she is this girl is like the most dominant athlete in her sport i think i've ever seen she's like she makes michael jordan look like he's in the d league you know would be the uh the um the the comparison um and she just just now just won the uh individual all-around gold medal in the olympics by an enormous margin yeah i've never seen the person who is best in their sport be so far ahead of the entire

pack yeah incredible and one of the i was watching an interview with her reading uh an interview with her and um uh one of the things that uh was said in it it reminds me of of the mindset taylor of your carve out um when she was a little younger i mean she's still only 19 but when she was a little younger she didn't really have a lot of confidence in herself and would say, Oh, well, I just, I'm not as good as the other girls, you know? And like, and now that she is like the most dominant athlete that's ever lived in the sport, pretty inspiring. So that's mine for the week. Yeah. Love it. Mine's a quickie. I, for those of you who listen to the alaska airlines episode know that um i have a thing for airplanes and uh there's this incredible video on vox it's only 10 minutes long on the

history of the concord how it came to be how that was funded what the other supersonic um airplane undertakings were and why we don't have supersonic flight today so if that's uh for for airplane nerds out there, you probably know it all, but it's just a really well put together little 10 minute video. And it's thrilling. So I highly recommend going and checking it out. We want to thank our longtime friend of the show,

Vanta, the leading trust management platform. Vanta, of course, automates your security reviews and compliance efforts. So frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, GDPR, and HIPAA compliance and monitoring. Vanta takes care of these otherwise incredibly time and resource draining efforts for your organization and makes them fast and simple. time, here on Acquired, Jeff Bezos, his idea that a company should only focus on what actually makes your beer taste better, i.e. spend your time and resources only on what's actually going to move the needle for your product and your customers and outsource everything else that doesn't. Every company needs compliance and trust with their vendors and customers. It plays a major role in enabling revenue because customers and partners demand it, but yet it adds zero flavor

to your actual product. Vanta takes care of all of it for you. No more spreadsheets, no fragmented tools, no manual reviews to cobble together your security and compliance requirements. It is one single software pane of glass that connects to all of your services via APIs and eliminates countless hours of work for your organization. There are now AI capabilities to make this even more powerful, and they even integrate with over 300 external tools. Plus, they let customers build private integrations with their internal systems. And perhaps most importantly, your security reviews are now real-time instead of static, so you can monitor and share with your customers

and partners to give them added confidence. So whether you're a startup or a large enterprise, and your company is ready to automate compliance and streamline security reviews like Vanta's 7,000 customers around the globe, and go back to making your beer taste better, head on over to vanta.com slash acquired and just tell them that Ben and David sent you. And thanks to friend of the show, Christina, Vanta's CEO, all acquired listeners get $1,000 of free credit. Vanta.com slash acquired. That's all we've got. Awesome. That's a wrap. Thanks, everybody for listening. And most importantly, huge thank you to Taylor for joining us. Yeah, Taylor, where can our audience find you? Yeah, no, I'm, you know, I'm here at Adobe. So feel free to drop me a line at

Barada at Adobe.com if you have something you think we should be looking at. I'm also on Twitter at just Taylor Barada and LinkedIn as well. So feel free to reach out and happy to chat. Awesome. And listeners, if you like the show, rate us on iTunes, tweet this episode to your friends, share it wherever you see fit,

and thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.