Buyer-Led M&A™ Strategy at Snowflake with Stefan WIlliams

22:41There's some real go-to-market motions that we can enable to these startups. So long way of saying, we're not investing to get eyes and ears and to potentially acquire. We're investing to build an ecosystem around AI and data in service of our customers. And so they can get use of data in more ways than just from Snowflake. They can utilize their data by using best-of-breed products across common underlying data platform that is Snowflake that might touch. Snowflake typically would service the CIO, but now with partner X, the CISO or the CHRO or the CRO or the CMO now can actually start to get functionality through applications powered on data that they already have.

23:19So you get them as a committed customer and then you're able to help them accelerate their growth with the go-to-market. Sometimes, and there's different deployment models. So yes, sometimes I can be Snowflake's customer directly. Others, we can actually be a deployment model for the partner. So partners can actually connect into the customer's underlying Snowflake in a secure and governed way and get access to a technology without having to go through a bunch of vendor security risk assessments and governance and legal requirements. As a startup, I'm a five-person startup based in some random country in the world.

23:47If I'm building and deploying within the boundaries of Snowflake through Snowflake's marketplace and with a Snowflake customer, you're able to do so with much less friction and you're able to do so at enterprise customers. Now you can go and deploy AI-enabled data applications at the biggest companies in the world as a small startup without having those lengthy vendor risk assessments that take months and that hinder business. That's interesting. That's why we see this model like popping up with other ecosystem plays. We just hit the startup fund, but it's more, now I get a real sense of why they do that.

24:18For Snowflake, obviously more data gets put in Snowflake, customer stickiness, drives consumption. Yes. For the customer, they get to activate and use more of the data that they have in Snowflake across many different lines of businesses and workflows. So I would say best of breed data platform with best of breed modular applications that sit on top of that in a common underlying data infrastructure. And then the partners, they get streamlined go-to-market and they get access to data to empower their applications. To the extent we can show real success, we can lean in more on the go-to-market side as well.

24:45So it's a three-way win, which is organic and it's not a stick, it's a carrot. I asked about the journey about building the M &A function. Now you've already expanded it to the three different pillars. You went from M &A, venture, then with the startup slash strategic partnerships. And we talked about the team brought in a mid-level person. I take it they're helping with more of the execution, financial modeling, quarterbacking diligence. How did the team expand from there? Did you bring in leads for these different groups and just things kind of built more naturally? A lot of them were already somewhat stood up.

25:16So there's teams that were in place. We've got people in the startup team that have been here for 10 years who were part of the sales organization when it very first started. Those are folks that have already been established. And there was a natural alignment between the two teams where it made a lot of sense. We were having the same conversations. The startup team was talking to venture capitalists. They were talking to startups. We were talking to venture capitalists and startups. And it's like, hang on, why are we having the same conversation twice? A lot of it was like streamlining the systems and processes internally to unlock a lot more efficiency.

25:43And now I feel like we've done that. Now we're on the offense. We're working as a team and driving. So that makes a lot of sense on this sort of front end. You've got alignment on the strategy, you're getting the right people in place, and everybody's getting aligned on what the goals are. When it comes to going back to what we mentioned, like the biggest risk is the integration. That doesn't go right. And I like how you made that point and you small and build up to it. Was there anything there that you had to do to get the organization ready? There was a couple of early deals. When you get the deal done, you ring the bell, you pat each other on the back and you're like, great, let's think about the next one.

26:13Or some leader in the company comes down on the next deal that's like the next highest priority. and suddenly the company just acquired, it's not really top of mind and had been balls that were dropped. We did bring in somebody on the integration side. One person that focuses on a lot of the project management and integration efforts and make sure that nothing's dropped because there's definitely this, when a deal is on and you come very tunnel vision on getting that deal done and you can lose sight of some of the smaller things that maybe in and of itself aren't going to break things, over time they start to accumulate and things start to get dropped.

26:43It was extremely important to bring on this integration lead who had six, seven years of integration experience directly onto the team. So that when we do, I think we did eight to 10 deals in one year where we needed it. And that was really where we had to make sure that we were a scaled team. This is where we turn into a little bit of therapy session where we might revisit some painful memories here, but bear with me. When we think about this first one, two acquisitions, what were those like lessons learned? You want to frame it that way. Yeah. That sort of got you thinking about what needs to change?

27:13There's always lessons learned, whether you're on completed deals, but also deals that don't materialize for one reason or another. And we try to do a good job of making sure we take some time after every deal to think through what are the things that worked, what are the things that didn't, what do we need to change, what should we do more of, and document it. We've done a pretty good job of making sure that we're learning from our mistakes. So when I do my first deal, I'm going to screw a lot of things up. I'm trying to short my learning curve here. So if you can just kind of give me a few...

27:39Just cut to the chase. Yeah, give me a few things to make sure I know. The first deals that we were doing, they were very small in nature. One of the things I've learned is that once you do a deal, and we talked a little bit about it on the integration side, but on the product side, who's directly responsible for the success of that integration? Because everyone has different priorities and everyone has things that they need to get done. And if you don't have one person or maybe two that are directly accountable to the success of the deal and make sure you have defined timelines post-acquisition to get back in a room and talk through, here's what we said we were going to do and here's where we're at.

28:12Be honest. Hold yourself accountable to what we said we were going to do and where are we at. On a regular cadence, 30, 60, 90, 180 after the deal, days after the deal. That's a very important thing to just not lose sight of. Because again, as deal people, we get excited by the next deal. And once you get it, it feels like another notch on the belt. That's just the beginning. Do the deal, that's the beginning. For the company, how do you integrate yourself and be part of that process to make sure that it's successful? Because guess what? If it's not successful, you're going to have a harder time doing the next one, two, and three deals.

28:40Accountability of integration and then having some clear... Having owners. Timeline. Owners. You need somebody to have as a directly responsible individual. We call them DRIs. DRIs. All right. I like that. This is helpful. So first deal, double down on that. Make sure you got folks who are really going to hold accountability, ownership, DRIs for the integration. Then have clearer timelines. These companies, when you acquire them, we talked about culture earlier. How do you look at that? I guess then versus now. you look at an organization and it's more about you're identifying a culture fit and that sort of lends to make a go-no-go decision.

29:16Is that part of it? Is it more of, this is how we're going to change this company's culture, or this is maybe going to modify our integration plan based on their culture? Everybody's got a different view. Culture is super, super important. And it's hard to put your finger on, oh, ask these questions and you'll have the magic number. Magic answer or magic number. I often allude to M &A being like the process of getting married. It takes many different engagements and interactions to validate, is this the right person for me? And do we have the right values? And how do we think about these things?

29:47Whatever it might be, like culture and trust, you discover and get that over time. That's part of diligence. That's part of why, at least in my experience, and I know it has happened in different deals, but like M &A isn't done. You can get deals done in a month or whatever timeframe it needs to be, weeks of these days. It's really relationships are built up over time. But now, here's the thing. Take it you're not buying all your assets on auctions because if you really want to build relationships, you got to take the buyer-led, be proactive out there, building relationships ahead of time. 100%.

30:17Is that most of your deals? Most of our deals are very much not the first time we've engaged yet. We would have typically engaged with them beforehand. Not all of them, but most of them. Coming back to the concept of culture, how do you identify whether folks are the right culture or not? It's something that you get a perspective on over time. The earlier you can have conversations with companies that maybe at the time you're not looking to acquire, you have a relationship, you have a partnership, you've won some joint customer success. All of that kind of leads into understanding how the company operates, how the company thinks.

30:50So it's just like dating. You got to spend the time. It's very similar to dating. You got to just put, yeah, you got to put the time in. You got to ask the right questions. You got to understand the incentives of people. You need to understand how they operate, how they treat people, how they treat their customers, how they treat their investors, how they treat their employees. How many deals you've done since you started the... A snowflake. Yeah, M &A deals. We're coming up to probably 20 acquisitions. 20 acquisitions. Out of 20, I'm curious about this. So you're obviously proactive. You're getting to know everybody.

31:16How many of them like turn into full-blown auctions? That proactive relationship development that give you like up in an auction process? It's interesting. Every banker will tell you that you need to have a competitive process to drive the optimal, the most optimal price. Yes. every banker listening to this right now would agree. What I'm trying to get to is you put all this effort and this is like I did this buyer-led framework and this is like the first pillar is really having a clearly defined strategy. If you have a clearly defined strategy it allows you to actually go be proactive and build those relationships.

31:48Yeah. And then what I'm curious about is what does that look like when it unfolds? Because Really buyer-led or is it really like a process? Yeah, because I mean it's inevitable at times. It's inevitable. If it's something that obviously the person has like multiple people inquiring, then they're probably going to hire a banker or something like that. So that's what I was curious about. 20 deals, how many of them actually end up in a bank process? And then what does that look like? Because sometimes it's a banker's in there, but it's still, they're just facilitating versus running an actual competitive process.

32:16Other times they're running a competitive process. And then I'm just curious, because you've invested in that time, how does it impact the outcomes of those scenarios? We often get banker processes. And if you have a relationship with the CEO at the time, that's going to be very helpful for your participation in that process. I don't think there's ever a case in which a relationship that you have is going to hurt you in any type of process. For a buyer-led motion, obviously that's going to... CEO to CEO is incredibly important. Cultivating that relationship over time and everyone's different. This is why M &A is so personal.

32:49Everyone acts different and when you're doing deals, you've got different things that different folks care about. Every seller has different motives. every person is different and you need to kind of dial in to understand what's their motivating factor. A relationship with the CEO and the relevant, maybe the relevant board, those are helpful in and of themselves. Are they going to stop a seller or a company's being bought, not sold? Are they going to stop them testing the market? Depends how strong that relationship is. Depends on the price that you're talking about. Depends on the conviction and the relationship that the folks have.

33:23There's just a lot of different factors that come into play to say, So out of 20 deals, how many ended up in a full-blown auction? And then how many ended up just being represented? And how many were purely proprietary? There's definitely some that are buyer-led and that were done in a way which enabled us to get a deal done without having to go down the complications of an active process for one reason or another. I would say the norm is probably companies that are, and it happens on a daily basis at this point in time, is I'm testing the market. I'm raising my series ABC, whatever it might be.

33:59But I've also, one of these conversations has turned strategic. And so I'm talking to a handful of companies. And if I was going to think of anyone, I'd love to think of Snowflake as a potential outcome. Is this something of interest? That's the most common outreach that we get. And that's something you've already talked to. They're just responding back. Typically, we could be an investor. We could be a partner. We might not be a partner. We might be banker in outreach. But I guess to level up a little bit, part of what allows you to operate a little bit more efficiently is to have a good understanding as to where is the company going from a product perspective?

34:28What are the strategic priorities? How do we think about proactive M &A versus reactive M &A? And how do we have a buyer-led process versus, hey, this company's for sale, are you interested? Which we'll always look at. You can cut through the noise a little bit if you're focused on what matters for you versus being reactive all the time. Were any of those 20 deals came in from a banker book first time you heard about the company? I don't think so. First time I've heard of the company is unlikely. At a minimum, I've heard of the company. Maybe haven't had a conversation. Maybe not had a conversation.

34:58So a very proactive approach in terms of how you guys build, pipeline, and ultimately execute these deals. We try to be as proactive as possible, but you need to be very receptive to being reactive. And having clarity on your strategy can help navigate those waters a lot more efficiently. If you do have that clarity on where do we think M &A is going to be able to be most utilized, whether it be from an aqua hire, product acquisition, or even transformative, is maybe a different case, but across the different spectrums of M &A. This is a big investment of time to build a relationship with all these CEOs, date them, understand the culture, things become actionable.

35:33Like I feel like early on, you're investing a lot of time in the relationship. But if we think like ultimately outcome is to have a successful integration, how do you take this phase in between your confirmatory diligence when you get things signed and move to close? How do you take that time to really set the deal up for success? And especially like culture is a big part of it. There's a rigorous diligence process. You learn from a lot of deals that you've done. Every deal, you learn something new. We have pretty refined business cases that get put together that have how we're thinking about integration.

36:04What are the measures of success? What are the integration milestones? Over what timeframes? It's documented. Everything's documented. You basically create like an integration thesis. 100%. It's documented. There's an integration thesis. And by the way, it's something that you need to collaborate on with the target. You're kind of peeling the onion with every layer of diligence. And at some point, you get to a place, once you've got through maybe the initial term sheet and you've agreed on price, the elephant in the room, and broad deal structure, things become a lot more collaborative because you're all on the same train of trying to get a deal done.

36:34It's not just a case of this is our view and this is how we're going to do it. And then day one, the company comes in and is like, right, how are we doing things? What's going on? So we've been working on this for the last few weeks. We're in agreement on not only the integration plan, but the timeline and my charter. You start with a thesis. You refine and iterate internally. you get through an initial hurdle of let's just say the term sheet and then you start to work increasingly collaboratively with the target get to a place where there's high conviction on the integration plan and you're acting as a team you're socializing the integration plan with the target at some point you have to bring confirmatory diligence this is opening up in the process of getting married right you have to start to open up you do have to start to share and they're going to start to share information that is increasingly sensitive as a buyer you need to lean into that it's a two-way thing it's not just tell me give me everything and i'll make the decision.

37:20It's collaborative. And by the way, founders have perspectives on what am I going to be doing? What's my job? What's the team going to be doing? Are you going to split them up into the four corners of the company? Are we going to maintain it being a team? Do we have a goal? What's our responsibility? Who do we roll into? What's the hiring plan? If we get married, we're going to buy a little house on the prairie, get a chicken coop. Yeah. A bunch of dogs and cats running around. Build the empire. We want to be clear about that before. Exactly. How do you build conviction? It's a process. You start with a thesis, you pressure test it, and then you collaborate on it and you collectively own it.

37:49And at the point of signing the definitive agreement, we're already acting as a team. It's we and us, not you and me. And day one, it's like, right, let's go. Get this done. You told me you did eight deals in one year. There was a year that was very busy. I'm curious about this part because you took all this stuff we've already talked about. There's a lot of effort, complexities, alignment, and accountability. Managing concurrent deals, I feel like, is its own challenge. And I'm curious about what have you learned? from? Because obviously you don't do eight sequentially. They're running some concurrent deals and how do you do that without blowing up people?

38:23You don't. It's a short answer. I think we've done three deals at one point in time and then we'll see at different stages. And this is where you do need to start building the team out and making sure that both the corp dev team, but also the functional diligence and integration teams. We can probably do those deals, but it does bear on the company and it distracts people from their day job and this is incremental to their day job. So you do end up burning the midnight oil a little bit. It's deal-based work. When it comes, you've got to be all on. And we didn't do three deals off the bat, a team of one.

38:54I had two deal leads myself. We're an analyst that was helping. We've got an integration manager that's working on the integration that's orchestrating all the different functional diligence and integration teams. There's often 70 to 100 people on the integration team across all the different functions in the company, making sure that we're integrating the systems and processes and people. And it's a big effort, it's tough because there's different term sheets and deal terms and negotiation tactics to think through the different dynamics of every deal. It's making sure that you're extremely organized, documenting things and trying to stay on top of it.

39:27It's not something I would like to do consistently, but it has happened. Make sure you got the right people. Right people. The right teams in place. Built that muscle so that it's not new to anyone. They've done it before. And look, some of them were smaller, so it was a lot easier to go and do the diligence and integration. These aren't huge deals that you're doing three concurrent, but... We can handle it. This is how we do things at Snowflake. Camp it up. Camp it up. Do you convince people to sell? Is it the relationship game and you're waiting for the phone call back or a call from the banker?

39:58There's the tactical on the economic side. There's an economic answer to that question, but I don't think we're trying to convince people to come and work at Snowflake. That's probably not the right deal to be doing. Often people see Snowflake as a scaled company by which the technology that Target company has built can really impact the world. I don't think of conversations that haven't really started that way. I don't think convincing somebody to sell is like the right part to start. Inspiring, it sounds like. You got the better together story. The early discovery is the early part of that relationship is what would that better together story look like?

40:33Does that interest you? Trying to have a pretty open conversation up front. Where's your heart and your head at? And is this something we should lean in on? Or is this something maybe you're not ready for? and you need to start getting signals as early as you can. You don't want to be going down a process where there's just no chance this company's going to sell and you're trying to convince it the whole way. That sounds like a lot of wasted energy. Inspire them to sell. Let them put the pieces together. You want them to want it, right? Yeah, it's almost a little bit of... And there's something, when you get into these cycles of talking about a deal, there's genuinely, there's some sort of excitement.

41:00You talk about the Gartner hype cycle and the more you engage, you're like, wow, this is going to be incredible. We're going to change the world. And then you get, this is amazing. And then it's, wow, we need to integrate into this way trough of disillusionment. And then you get onto this path of like, all right, I see the light and we've got a real path here. If you're starting off that beginning part of the hype cycle, that is... That's how excitement's got to be seated within that company, the target CEO. Like they got to have some... It's almost like an organic excitement. Yeah, I think so.

41:28You nurture and cultivate that through the CEO to CEO and leadership to leadership conversations that you have. And you're going to know pretty quickly coming out of that meeting whether that's really... That's actually really cool. It's usually not one party saying that. Usually you come out both kind of thinking along those lines. Convincing somebody to sell doesn't feel like the recipe for success. When you're talking to CEOs, how do you decipher between this is an M &A conversation versus the venture conversation? Because you even mentioned that you'll have folks that are at their next venture round, but then they're exploring M &A.

41:59How do you sort of look at that opportunities of which matter where? Or does it just come up through those early conversations? It goes back to something we talked about earlier, just being plugged into the business and understanding what's interesting from an M &A perspective and what's not. There's a lot of opportunities that come my way or it's clearly not going to be an acquisition opportunity for us. But there is often a partner motion. And given that they're raising... So we don't lead rounds. We typically participate in rounds. So given they're raising a round, they're like, is there a conversation to be had on the investment side?

42:27Which then comes down to, what is it from a product perspective that we're doing that's interesting? What is the movement of data? Do we have any joint customer success today? And if we did get into a room, is that what are the things that could be interesting to really double down on from a product and engineering perspective that could lead to a better outcome for customers. And if there's something to talk about there, that's when ventures can be a lot more impactful. But deciphering between one or the other is making sure, again, you have alignment with where the product is going, what our strategy is, how we think about M &A, make sure we have alignment across the executives.

42:56And hopefully by understanding that, you at least know when something's interesting or not from an acquisition perspective. And if it is, then obviously there's a path to go and double click and learn more and have the right conversations across both companies to hopefully get to a no, which is always the easy answer, or that's actually a little bit interesting. Why don't we go and do these one or two things more to learn more? So if you're participating in these venture deals, you're not negotiating for a call. A call option? No. Right of first refusal? No. We ask for a right of notification.

43:23Yeah, ROFIN. Notification. Right of first refusal. I know there's an acronym for it. Yeah, ROFIN. Right of first notification, which is basically, we're going to invest. We're going to lean in on the partnership. We're going to try to give you some go-to-market benefits. We're going to try to, in good faith, do the right thing. and if you're going to sell the company, I just want a heads up. I don't want to read about it in the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times. I want a heads up. And that heads up is, hey, we've been approached. Before I sign anything that's exclusive, I'm just giving you your notification.

43:48I don't have the right to understand who the buyer is, how much it's for, but I do have the right to participate if I wanted to, to put an offer in. And then you get, as a founder, get the decision to make as to whether that's interesting or not. But at least I have a seat at the table when the decision is being made. That's a fair outcome. That's fair. Can we talk about just some of the deals? You don't have to name the company, but what are the deals you're most proud about? I just want to hear how it went down. Yeah. Recency bias a little bit just because they're more top of mind. But Neva was a pretty cool deal.

44:14Sridhar is now our CEO, buying a company that ultimately ends up being the company that you work for as CEO. There's value that you're adding. As a corporate development professional, you're always trying to think about how am I bringing value to the table? And are these deals actually driving real business outcomes and success? And Sridhar is obviously an incredible leader and leading the ship at Snowflake now. It's been an incredible year and a half, maybe. That's for an acquisition. Shridhar's company, Neva, we acquired through an acquisition. And now Shridhar is our CEO. Oh, wow. That was obviously a really good deal for the company.

44:41And Shridhar's co-founder is the head of our engineering team. And it was really the foundation of a lot of what we do in AI today. An incredibly important acquisition for the company. And we've obviously got the most important leaders in our company now being driven by a lot of that company that came into Snowflake. So extremely impactful acquisition. I'd say two more recent ones are pretty interesting. we acquired a company called DataVolo, which is now what Snowflake calls OpenFlow, which is a kind of a connectivity platform that allows a lot of data to come in by structured and unstructured into Snowflake.

45:10The whole framework that we've stood up upon, the product we acquired, which has been extremely impactful. We announced it at our user conference. So again, when I answer these questions, it's like, what are the most successful? I guess I'm answering in most impactful. And then the most recent one we did was Crunchy Data, which is a whole new opportunity. It's a Postgres database in a managed service company or has a managed service around hosting Postgres databases and the prospect of weaving and integrating it into Snowflake and the workloads that are going to be relevant for us as a company going forward and the applications that are going to be more relevant.

45:41It's extremely exciting. Top of mind, they're more recent ones, but yeah, those three have been pretty impactful. Hopefully continue to be successful at the company. That would be so daunting joining your team at this time because it's just matured so much in early days when I got to know Snowflake. I'll take that as a compliment. Hopefully we've matured. These are awesome to hear about some of those deals. And I guess what I wanted to lend into is just this current market we're in. AI, things are getting pulled under your rug in multiple different directions. And how do you keep up with it? We're in this tiny little space of M &A technology.

46:13And I can't even keep up with how many AI companies for M &A are popping up. I'm sure they're reaching out to you. Yeah. Companies just going from zero to 10 to 100 million in a couple of years, which is just, it's unheard of. And yeah, the product market fit there is incredible. So how do you stay on top of it? It's just continuing this theme of just being a student of your industry, a student of the product that you have, the landscape that you operate in, and the newest and most innovative technologies that are coming out in the world. And obviously, that's AI today. Teach me, how do you do this?

46:44How do you diligence these companies, even know you're buying the right thing? You use AI. Good answer. Out of the box, knowing the right thing is not one thing. It's a combination of things, as we talked about earlier. It's having the right systems, processes, the right alignment, the right ownership, the right measurements of success, the right integration plan. All of that is going to lead to whether a deal can be integrated and successfully driven to hopefully the conclusion that you thought it would be. But staying on top of industry trends, I speak to a VC pretty much every day. These guys are putting money where their mouth is.

47:18Their livelihoods are based on carry and they're investing a lot of time into a particular space. And I'll do your job. Well, question upon question and just be curious and inquisitive and understand the trends and double down on that and ask the same question to another founder or investor or whatever, whoever it might be, and then go and have a similar conversation internally. What do you think about this technology category? Have we thought about this? Are we looking to build? Are we looking to potentially integrate? What are your thoughts on that? this kind of hunger to always learn, always be curious, always question and make sure you understand.

47:46If you can continue to do those types of things, again, lead you to be the student of your profession, you're going to be much better situated to go and figure out how to navigate the waters in a vastly evolving AI market. Got to do your homework. Got to do your homework. When you look at just this AI landscape and all these companies popping up, how do you even keep tabs on them? That's something I'm even struggling with. My tracker just gets longer and longer. The tracker does get long, yeah. There's obviously the logistical, like how do you keep tabs and track and document and make sure you're keeping tabs on them.

48:15I think for companies that are either AI relevant or being built in and around data and AI thinking about Snowflake, that's where the Snowflake for startup teams is really helpful in having a feed of information. It's almost a little bit like a pipeline. More on the venture and partnership side versus M &A, but it's always good to know who's doing well in and around the ecosystem. As it relates to AI, there's a huge push in the company to be increasingly AI forward. We've got some incredible initiatives out there. We've got the Cortex REST API service that can abstract the complexity of which underlying foundation model you want to have and put your data against or have your application run against.

48:54The whole Cortex service with Cortex Analyst, Cortex Search, and Snowflake Intelligence, which is an intelligence layer across all of your data where you get to ask questions of your data. There's so much activity happening with companies building on top of those primitives that Snowflake builds. It's extremely exciting. And one of the good things is we have a lot of telemetry on the activity and the consumption that these startups are making happen within Snowflakes. There is a data feed that you have that helps understand who's driving the best outcomes, what are the signals from customers that we're getting.

49:25So that's obviously one way we keep abreast of it. That's a smart way to do it. You got a big startup ecosystem. We got a big startup ecosystem. We get a lot of data. There's a whole separate kind of partnership team as well outside of the strategic partnerships that I manage that are managing a lot of those relationships and making sure that we're making the right kind of tags or getting them to provide the right telemetry to ultimately give us information to help make them successful to the extent they're able to be successful. There's a lot happening. And when I just level up a little bit and talk about a lot of the cortex, the AI services we provide, the principle behind how we are relevant is that whether you're a company or a startup, you're able to use the most innovative AI technologies against your data.

50:05From a customer perspective, it's going to allow increased business outcomes. From a partner perspective, it allows you to get access to a lot more data to drive those business outcomes. One of the most interesting areas that we're spending a lot of time is agents are everywhere. And agents are the ability to act as a knowledge worker and pick your function. and if you can empower knowledge workers with obviously the AI capabilities that are generic, but also specific and bespoke to your data, your needs. I think Snowflake is an incredible platform to think about as you look to use AI to drive those business outcomes.

50:40I'm going to revisit it. I'm like, we're in a deal room. We got to figure out how we can leverage and connect with Snowflake, especially so many organizations. We should work together on that. We should. There's some opportunity there. I got a couple just quick little fire questions before we wrap up here. I want to know, what's the top thing that you look for when you talk to these founders, CEOs of companies, what is the top trait that gives you a good signal that this is a strong company to talk to? From a company perspective, customers' success speaks volumes. If customers are willing to pay for something, there's obviously real value there.

51:10What's the traction? What do those retention rates look like? What's the growth profile look like? Net new customers coming on board? What are the growth patterns there? So customer data points and customer metrics speaks volumes and obviously rolls into revenue. From a cultural perspective, I like to meet founders that are hungry, humble and know how to hustle. That's ideal. Being humble isn't underrated. Having humility and the ability to kind of appreciate one's perspective, but have strong conviction in your own opinion and being willing to debate and talk through things is an extremely appealing trait.

51:41But I think in this world of AI, if you don't have hustle, you're not going far. Those are good. I think they even get harder as you start achieving success. All of a sudden it gets harder to be humble. Yeah, it does. when you start to see success. It's hard to have those three. Hungry, humble, and... Unfortunately, I got immigrant parents. I go visit them. They remind me. They remind them. Yes. I need you to go help sweep the floor. If you can tell me what's... What are the red flags? Just what are the red flags I should look out for to run away from a deal early on? Usually, you're speaking to just the founder or CEO.

52:15The red flags are probably going to be from conversations with them. Signals on prioritizing outcomes for an individual. versus thinking about the broader mission and team. Having founders that care about the joint mission going forward, that care about how their employees are treated, versus sole... I mean, folks economically will try to solve for the highest dollar, but there's within reason. Obviously, the price needs to be right, but equally important is landing on the right mission and having the right message to deliver to their team. And if that starts to become out of focus, that's a red flag.

52:50That's a really good point. You've got to be more than yourself. Yes. What's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? I haven't seen as many crazy things or heard as many crazy things as you have. But I would say in line with it's not done till it's done. The deal's not done till you've signed on the dotted line. We've been down at least one process, I remember, pretty far down a path, pretty much ready to go and sign a deal, only to be informed by the CEO that an offer three times the amount has been put on the table, which at the time was already a pretty high price for the company, the size and the scale that they were.

53:25It goes to say that no deal is done until it's done. Don't count your chickens before they hatch. And it put us a little off guard, but these things happen. One of the big three came in overpaid. No comment. That's technically his big four, but yeah. Okay, that happens. Isn't that good? Have fun. No, it wasn't fun. A lot of effort for nothing. No outcome. Then again, deals happen as part of the business. If the seller, you can have a breakup fee. If the buyer doesn't commit, you can have a breakup fee. But if the seller falls out, there's no nothing. There was no breakup fee in the deal. Yeah, because you wouldn't do that.

53:57This is a great conversation. I really appreciate taking a break from doing deals to help me become a better M &A scientist. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate the time. Good conversation. If anyone is still listening to this, you made it all the way to the end. You are my fellow brother, sister, M &A scientist out there. I love to hear from you. Reach out to me, LinkedIn. Love to hear your ideas for topics, criticism. I take it. It's how I get better at doing this. Until next time, here's to the deal.

54:32Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of M &A with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post. Add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up an M &A function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email, Kisan, K-I-S-O-N, at mascience.com. Or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, Visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter.

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55:31Views and opinions expressed on M &A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational.