YouSaid · the spoken record

Alicia Wisel

lines on the record: 61
first: 2018-11-17
most recent: 2018-11-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And so you do what you'd expect, which you learned if you went to business school, which you do the really long DCF analysis to get to a place where something actually has revenue and actually has earnings. And then you get yourself in a lot of trouble when that gets to a single answer, like $1.25 billion. Inevitably, that's wrong. What the math teaches you is what do you need to believe in order for it to succeed? So do need to believe that the company is going to grow at 100% on the top line for the next 20 years. Probably not happening. Do you need to believe that it only needs to grow at 10% and down to 5, and that seems more rational? And that type of conversation, even if you get into a room with a company or with executives that haven't dealt with these higher growth businesses, that's a debate that you can have rather than is it worth 1.25 or 1.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a couple things. We deal with this question not just in MA, but also on the organic side. Because if you think about things that we're building internally, they're definitely pre-revenue. They're like way pre-revenue. There are years and years and years away from pre-revenue revenue, and they may never get there. And so this question of how you value that is not just a question for the M&A side, but it's also a question on the organic side. And what I find is that in most big companies, people do want numbers.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And as you've made this kind of evolution earlier in your career, there's kind of more mature markets, which in my experience is largely about finances and cash flows and things I don't know very much about for sure. As you get more into innovation, a lot of the acquisitions happen, say, pre-revenue or really early revenue, and it's much harder to value the assets at this point. Strategic value is enormous because if you don't do it, maybe you go out of business, so that's a big number. But on the other side, it doesn't really make sense just from the numbers. How do you think about putting a dollar on the value for a company or an M&A in these kind of more strategic and early?”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Times you're buying the business not just for the product or the technology, but it's for the people. And being humble enough to actually leave those people alone to continue to innovate and succeed. And in some cases, the people that you have bought at a much smaller company become the leaders in a large organization. Recently, I've been working with a woman who was acquired by a very large company, and her entire tech team has basically become for a much larger organization the CTO, the head of marketing, all of those people from a much smaller company have now taken over those positions at a larger company, and that's been a recipe for success.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I've seen companies do MA well, and by the way, I have seen, I have helped companies buy businesses that they've ultimately ended up selling, so I've certainly seen some of the round trip. When companies decide to do something for strategic reasons, when everyone gets together and decides it's the right thing to do, and by everyone, I mean, it doesn't mean everyone has to agree because getting to consensus in some of these situations may actually not be the right answer. But what I mean is the people at the table are not just the deal guys and gals. It's also the people who have to integrate the transaction when both of those people are at the table from the beginning and understand what they're buying, understand what it's going to take for the acquisition to succeed. I find you have a better chance of it succeeding. Not because they're always right, but because they're there together as a team. The second thing, and this happens more with more innovative businesses than more old line industrial companies, a lot of”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, one thing on the studies when I first started in MA, I started reading those studies and they were too depressing for me. So I stopped reading them. Because I was an analyst. I've been doing M&A for 20 years for other companies and now responsible for doing it for us.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for the MA side, I think the broad view has been that it almost always fails. This is kind of like the academic view. Certainly, there's a number of examples for that. My experience has been quite different, actually. So was a choir, built a large business. And so I thought maybe it would be great to hear your thoughts on, are there the right preconditions for success or are these exceptions, is this survivorship bias?”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And one example would be we recently, over the last couple of years, has gotten into consumer banking through a brand that we call Marcus. And if you look at that business, we've actually done it both ways. So we've bought a couple of businesses, but we've also built it organically. And I think that mix of doing things together in exactly the same place is what's helped us succeed.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great, so I don't think about it as tension. I think about it as the way that we think about it is that we want strategy and M&A to be in the same place. So instead of having a group of people that goes off and does strategy and a group of people that goes off and does M&A and by the way incentivizing a group of people in the M&A group just to get deals done, our view is that they should be in the same place. And the idea really is you need to know what your strategy is. So first you have to decide where you want to go, where you're trying to head, and then the question is, do you do it organically or inorganically? And I don't think it's an either or. It's a both. And in many cases, when we're looking at it, we look at opportunities and say if we could buy a business, what would that business be? And therefore, how much would we ultimately be willing to pay for that business? And is it available? And if it wasn't available, how do we do it organically? And we kind of run those things right next to each other. And in many cases, as we're going after new initiatives,”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All right, great. So to start off with, maybe we'll start with the MA side. Having been in a large public organization and kind of struggling with this, I think M&A was kind of one of the Harrier topics because there was always this calculus, do we do it in-house? Do we not do it in-house, this and that. So I thought maybe we'd provide some framing for at a high level, how do you think of the tension between M&A versus kind of internal or organic”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. So I started at Goldman Sachs almost 20 years ago, so out of preschool. And it's the only full-time job I've ever had. I started in our M&A group. I ended up then transferring to our industrial group. I ran our general industrial business. I spent seven years on the West Coast doing non-tech M&A, so the least cool person in Silicon Valley doing non-tech. MA flying to Portland and Washington and Los Angeles for that matter. And then I started and ran a new business inside the firm, which was M&A for financial and strategic investors. So that was an included venture capital, but was also private equity pension funds, stopping wealth funds, family offices. And then I was asked to be chief strategy officer. And I started in January.”
2018-11-17 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: M&A and Innovation, Inside Out · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source