Corporate Development Strategy: Notion's M&A Approach with Hilary Shirazi

24:09We show, hey, we have our highest folks are focused on this and care about this. So it's not just something, it's not a homework assignment we're asking you to do. We truly want to hear from you what you want to do here. And it's not pitched as prove it to us. It's more, you're setting up yourself for success. So we will sign off on these plans and then you'll know exactly what you're going to do here day one. That helps founders imagine themselves creating this value together and getting them really excited about joining up and frankly accelerating whatever they've been building on already. What does that look like once you sign an LOI, you move into conformatory diligence?

24:50Are the founders, are they literally creating an integration plan now? Oh, our founders are there? The target. Oh, the target. But no, so we think about their plan as... It's almost like a, we say integration thesis. Yeah. You can move goalposts. So they're goalposts and you don't have to have everything figured out, but you want to know, okay, we're marching in this direction. And so there's not a ton more detail that we require on that. What are we in the ship when? At that point, we know what we need to go do the diligence. Because, for instance, if they say, in order to accomplish our 12-month roadmap, we actually think we want to pause building our current product and focus all our attention on building this integrated product.

25:37We wouldn't go do a ton of diligence on helping merge infrastructures, for instance. We would really focus on what is that future vision. It really informs our diligence plan so that we know, okay, how much attention do we need to pay to all of the different aspects of a deal? And just focus on the ones where we know that we're going to have them build towards on day one. I guess I was curious about what that looks like when you're going through this process, informatory diligence, and just almost like the synchronization between those founders looking to work through that and then your team as well.

26:14Is that sort of collaborative? Yeah, we try to minimize the number of people from our side that they're talking to. I was on one deal at a public company where the team we were acquiring was less than 50. And by the end, we had 75 people internally just working on the M &A. We had more people internally than at the company we were actually acquiring. And that can get overwhelming. That's not how you blow up startups. Just put more people. This was across all functions, accounting and IT and workplace and all that stuff. We don't want the founders that we're acquiring to see any of that because it's just all details.

26:52It's like we have a specialized person for every different work stream. And they're a startup, so they have one person that does 20 of the things. So CorpDev really tries to limit the number of people that founders have to coordinate with. That's in a best case scenario. And then you're funneling all of the requests. You're making sure that all the internal questions are getting compiled on the back end. And then you're going through and figuring out what actually needs to be asked. I was working on one where we had a great benefits team. Kudos to them. but they were really focused on figuring out what the gym membership of the target startup was so that we could maintain parity of benefits.

27:35And we just finally said, enough. They don't have a gym membership plan because they're a startup. And so, you know, we can kind of just ignore that. So we try to not push back on our own side, but make sure that the right questions are getting filtered. So quarterbacking that process. Is integration, what does that look like structurally in your company? Is it a team? Is it within CorpDev? Most of the places I've worked don't have a completely separate integration function. So at LinkedIn, we had one person on the people side who was fully dedicated to M &A integration. People's the most important thing.

28:10But otherwise, corporate development also acted as internal integration. So that meant the people who worked on the deal pivoted to then own integration after the fact. And there was actually no transition because we had developed the integration plan prior to term sheet. And we do that at Notion as well. We can just follow through. And then the integration function at the company are different cross-functional leaders who have been identified as people who can really help guide the process internally. And what that's looked like at larger companies is it becomes this role that's a rotational program where you're a full-time technical accounting person.

28:51But if an M &A comes up, you then pivot to work on that technical accounting piece. And after mastering that, you get promoted. So it's pitched as if you can carve out time in your cross-functional role to help with the integration, that's a step up. That's one way to get people to help with integration internally. Get them to do the dirty work. Yeah. The fun stuff. Maybe if you're like really type A, I look at some of these and there's no way. Not for me. The integration plan. It's interesting that you have a version of it at Termsheet. How detailed is it? Because you kind of mentioned like the founder comes in.

29:29It's just like, what is, how detailed is that actually? It's as detailed as we can make it without assigning too much process. So you always want to be flexible, but it goes back to that having goalposts. post. So a lot of the time, if we're not sure how we want something to end up, we say, by this period of time, we want to run these A-B tests to figure out what we actually want to do here. But we know what we want to figure out. We don't have to have it figured out, but we know what we want to do by what period of time so we can march towards that. So for instance, when I was at LinkedIn and we acquired lynda.com, we didn't necessarily know how we wanted to divide the consumer business from the sales business and what parts we wanted to integrate.

30:14We ran really lightweight A-B tests to see what do we want to change. So before we made any big decisions, we had that informed data and we could bring that to the execs. We did periodic check-ins and said, here's what we found. Here's what we're going to do. And then we'd have it sign off. You don't know everything from the start, but you timebox, okay, when are we going to have this figured out? When are we going to have this figured out? And you kind of keep it flexible. There's a point where you have a timeline of at least some ideas of where we want to get. For instance, you can say in a year, we want to have this product shipped with Cron, which became Notion Calendar.

30:51We had a rough idea of we want to keep their product running. It's a beautiful product. It had users, but we need to integrate it into Notion to get that beautiful collaborative workspace benefit. We said, okay, this time period, let's do a rebrand and let's make sure it gets rolled out to all the Notion users. And so you pick that as your North Star. So everyone's really working towards it. I like that example. So Cron was a calendar app. Yep. And then you acquired this business. They already had a customer base. Yep. Did you just day one, we're now part of Notion? No. So we did announce that they were part of Notion right after the acquisition.

31:31We didn't rebrand it. So we kept the Cron logo, we kept the Cron domain, and then about a year after acquisition, we flipped a switch, we rebranded to Notion Calendar, and we did a big push across our entire user base saying, now you can use this Notion Calendar. For a lot of people, it was new. There's always the users that said, oh, I used Notion Calendar back when it was Cron. So they know that there was that period. Then it became part of the platform because you really did an actual integration. Yep. So now we have a Notion calendar team that's been expanded since we... It was three employees when we acquired them.

32:08And now the calendar team is... It's much bigger. What's the go-to-market thinking? Because that's always an interesting one. When this, obviously, product was sold as a standalone, but then you bring it as a platform. Is it some part of the suite? Does it become an add-on? Yeah. That's another thing we think about the go-to-market plan. It might be a good time to talk about the four different types of M &A. The go-to-market plan differs across those four. So it's something we call the four T's, which is talent, tech, traction, and terrain. And those four T's represent a different kind of acquisition.

32:42Talent is the smallest. So you're only bringing on the... That's what people talk about when they talk about acquihire. So then you're not even bringing the product on. You're just bringing on a team that builds whatever they've been building on your platform. And then it's tech. And that's when you're acquiring the IP or a product that really helps you get... Accelerate time to market. So Calendar was a really good example of that, where we knew we wanted to offer a calendar product. And buying a calendar company, keeping it running, and then rebranding it was an immediate way to do that. At that point, you do want to think about, are we going to directly monetize?

33:20To your point, how are you thinking about bringing it to market? Is it an add-on? Is it for retention? Across all companies, that's part of the integration plan. Part of what is success? Is it bringing new users in the door? Is it a new SKU? Generally for tech, it's a product feature that you're adding. So you're not expecting some sort of new monetary value. The third T, traction, is where I see new go-to-market strategies come into play. And traction, in my mind, is basically acquiring customers or revenue that open up a strategic adjacency, that's where you're bringing in the whole company, not just the tech, not just the product, but you're keeping it running.

34:01Maybe you're adding it to your sales team. Maybe you're putting it on your pricing page. But traction deals are really where you're saying, Okay, this is something I want to monetize. And I would say, we're not doing that yet here. And we did some math when I was at LinkedIn on when is the right time to start doing traction deals. And we basically saw, and again, this was 10 years ago, but we saw that when a company reached or had line of sight to a billion of core ARR, didn't have to be at a billion of ARR, but a billion of core ARR, that's when you should start doing those bigger traction deals.

34:34When you hear traction, that's to use an old school example, Google buying YouTube. YouTube had traction. Facebook buying Instagram. Instagram had traction. So what are you bringing on and you're going to leave independent? So LinkedIn's example is LinkedIn buying Linda. We kept it as a standalone business and kept selling it. That is when you're really thinking about what is our revenue targets for this. And then the final T is terrain, which is something only the really large companies do, which is like a 10-year bet. So again, old school example, but Facebook buying Oculus. What is a place that we know we want to be in 10 years?

35:09And only pretty big companies can really be thinking about that and spending tons of money in that category. So talent, tech, traction, terrain, each one of those has a different set of, I would say, like diligence questions, success metrics, and smaller companies or even bigger companies that are just starting out should acquire in that order to build the muscle of how do we make M &A successful and work their way up. I love the way to think about this. So talent is basically people only. Tech is IP or product. Traction. You're thinking of a new go-to-market and really thinking of revenue synergies.

35:44And then your terrain is basically a new platform where you're really getting away from the core. Yes. Exactly. Awesome. When you have that fit, then that sort of shapes how you approach the deal. Then you can clarify that with the team. This is why we're doing the deal. This is what that means. And then you start answering those questions. Right. I want to go back on the integration. IMO, integration management office. Traditionally, a lot of big corps around here in the valley will have an IMO set up and they will hand off the integration responsibilities. Corp. dev will hand it off to IMO and they'll run it.

36:17They'll execute a hundred-day plan or depending on the deal, right? It could be a big one and it takes longer. And then they eventually hand it off to the business. You don't do that. No, I do wonder if part of that is just being at a kind of always smaller company. I'll put in quotes. When I joined LinkedIn, it was about 3 ,000 people. By the time I left, it was about 13 ,000, 14 ,000, if you don't count Microsoft. You can still manage without an IMO if you're doing four to five acquisitions a year that are not super complex and traction heavy, as it were. I also think the reason that a lot of integration fails is either the plan wasn't right the first time, or it's not understood and followed properly on the back end.

37:06The more connective tissue you can have between the people that worked on the deal thesis and brought it to life can also then shepherd it into fruition and reality on the back end. What that has looked like in the integration functions where I've been is the deal lead will literally pivot to making the deal a success, which I think is the same thing a lot of integration teams do. But it's just that person that worked on the deal is then also pivoting their set of skills. I think a lot of the times, CorpDev folks, and I'll screen for this, are like, I just want to do the glamorous deals and the deal work and then ignore what comes next.

37:46But I'll do that unglamorous, going around with a clipboard. I remember when we went around to all the acquired engineers and said, What kind of Mac do you want? Super tactical stuff just to make sure that people are landing and feeling like this is my home. I want to work here. I want to make it successful because they haven't had that discourse like the founders have. So you really want to go and make sure that every single person to the extent possible. And again, this is why maybe bigger companies doing bigger deals need a whole integration team to make that a reality. But we did that all on our own at LinkedIn.

38:21And at Pinterest, I did hire a head of integration. She reported to me she was sitting in the room with the deal lead from day one, getting to know the founders, developing that integration plan. So even though it had a separate name, they weren't separate from the team at all. And they were shoulder to shoulder. And they were someone who had come from within the company. They knew how all the people functions work and could make that really clean transition from... here's why we're doing the deal to here's how to make the success. Cause I know exactly how this company runs. I can seamlessly bring it together.

38:58They're along for the ride. Yeah. Everything. Yeah. Diligence. I'm a little bit biased in having integration just be hand in hand with corp dev, if not the same. But then again, once you get to those super duper large acquisitions, that process probably breaks and you need to. So no shade on that. Yeah, that's fair. That's a fair, I had a good conversation with a friend who's an integration leader about this. Cause he did both. He did it with an IMO, without the IMO. It was much better without the IMO because it just, he didn't have a necessary handoff. Right. Straight to the business. In this sense, it's like you have CorpDev that sort of takes more of that accountability around orchestrating the integration.

39:34But then the business is really in there, involved to... Exactly. Pick things up and get it done. Yeah. Pretty cool. Anybody that's an IMO want to debate this, feel free to reach out. Hillary and I hop on a live webinar about this. That's a good idea for our next one. Absolutely. I got to ask you, when you see integrations go off track? Oh, yeah. Why? I would say integrations go off track for a few reasons. Sometimes there is no plan. You would be surprised at how many times the plan is super high level and hand wavy. I've seen this firsthand. I've heard horror stories. but someone is really pounding the table and they have a specific reason that they want the deal to go through and they're willing to ignore the other questions in order to accomplish this one thing.

40:29What happens is you ignore all the downsides and risks that might mean that you can't even accomplish that one thing once you buy the company. Not having a plan is definitely the number one way for an integration to fail. Surprising that it happens, but it does. Another is no clear deal sponsor. So if it's unclear on who's going to own it after the fact, because you really want that person to pound the table for this kind of external organism that you're absorbing, it's not smooth. You need someone internally who's respected, who's stable, who has the trust of the exec team to just manage that company through the process.

41:10I've seen also where a deal sponsor happens to leave after the fact, they lose that. I've seen deals where the strategy changes after the acquisition happens. So you can have the clearest strategy in the world, but sometimes there's turnover at the top and that changes. And then the company is there and they pivot and it can still be fine. I've also seen a horror a story where the acquired company was on AWS and everyone hands over all their credentials. But then we wanted to change the credit card on the AWS account. And the person that had the login details from our side had not added it to a 1Password and was on some leave where we couldn't reach out to them.

41:52So we tried to add the new credit card and we couldn't because we didn't have the admin password. And so literally the acquired company's site went down for three days. We were like, we want to give you the payment method. And they're like, you're not the admin. So that was probably one of the... Luckily, in the end, everything was okay. But that was definitely an integration gone wrong. So now I'm very on top of all the credentials, which again, not glamorous, but one of those details that you really need to manage. Make sure someone's paying an electric bill. Yeah, exactly. Is there a working credit card on all the accounts?

42:27Wow. These are great examples of what goes wrong. We talked through most of the life cycle. We kind of talked about the strategy, how it shapes, how you do diligence, but really put integration thinking in the forefront and get to execution, get the team members involved in collaborating directly. Tech is a big piece. There's a lot of people out there still using Excel. I got to ask, as unbiased way as possible, as a founder of a tech company that supports executing M &A, I know you use Notion, which I'm a big fan of. Dogfooding, I agree. I love to hear about the value add. I feel like just having a place to collaborate, single source of truth, and I feel like you've achieved it.

43:05I love to hear about how you use Notion to do M &A. Yeah. And I tell you, we use Notion in our company. Amazing. Fuel Room uses Notion. It supports a lot of it. It reminds me, I actually got to update my little CEO corner section in there. I'll do that after the interview. That's great to hear. I will say being at Notion and using Notion to run CorpDev, it's very meta, but it's amazing because the thing I struggled with most across all of the CorpDev teams that I've worked on is we use so many different tools. There's a prospecting tool, you use a CRM, there's a deal checklist, you have to build alignment documents.

43:41And because you can do all those things in Notion. You can use it as a CRM. You can use it as your team work hub, present your deal thesis. You can use it as a project management tool. You can do all the work in one place. The way we have it set up is we have our internal CRM in Notion. And each company we talk to has a card, a page basically, and everything gets built off of that. So every company has its own status. and then every time we have a meeting, we put the notes right there. And then once you actually start getting active, we can drop in templates that we've created for a template for the team, a template for the process, a template for the thesis document.

44:27We've basically built up a template for everything that we need to do and we can hone it inside the card to keep everything organized and also manage permissions. So it's pretty neat to have all of that. But I'm kind of laughed because I'm part of a corporate development Slack group where someone said, Hey, what's your tech stack? What do you use? And everyone had 12 different pieces of software. And I was like, we use Notion. You use it for everything? For pipeline, diligence, integration? What we don't use it for is data, company data. If you think about Crunchbase or PitchBook, obviously, we don't have company data.

45:02But for any tools, kind of like software tools, that's been replaced with Notion. But if you do your search in PitchBook or any of those products and shortlist it, would you put that shortlist in Notion? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you'll do that. Everybody does that. Yeah. Some database for the private company data and then get saved. Yeah. And then the counterparty. You'll go back and forth in diligence with them. We will use wherever they like to upload their docs. If they want to email to us, we'll do a shared Notion. If they email them, we'll drop them in that. Or we can do a shared Notion outside the Notion workspace.

45:37it's actually nice to see you can tell now what founders are aligned where they'll send us an email and in the footer it'll say sent with Notion mail. So you can tell who uses Notion on a day-to-day basis and that's a good sign that they'll be a fit. Same with Notion calendar. And if we say, hey, what's your pitch? We talked about building that day zero, six month, 12 month plan. Now most founders do it in Notion and they'll send it to us in the shared Notion doc with the seamless kind of collaboration experience. I've seen it firsthand, the flexibility, the templating I've seen. I was actually impressed because I went just to poke around with the marketing team does.

46:12So I didn't realize this podcast, the whole back end of it is on Notion. Everything, every step of the production, the guests that we're hunting down, everything's all on Notion. That's awesome. That's awesome to hear. And actually, I've demoed my corp dev setup for other corp dev teams. Because speaking of startups, a lot of startups use Notion. So when they get acquired, their acquirer will usually try to get them to cut software. And a lot of the times they'll kick and scream and say, I don't want to give up my notion. And so I'll say, well, if you want to use it, here's how I use it and try to pitch for dev teams to adopt it internally to help create the case to keep it instead of having them spin up on another tool.

46:54So for the old school people out there on Excel, what's the pitch and the value of having everything in one place? You don't have to search for anything and it's all there. And maybe we can get into AI, but with everything in one place, I literally just go ask AI. For instance, someone came to me internally and said, hey, what mobile companies have we talked to? We might be interested in mobile. I went into Notion AI and I said, what mobile companies have I talked to? And it literally pulled up the seven recent conversations I'd had with companies. And And that's not just in the name. It searched my notes.

47:33It searched the website. It said, Hey, here's five companies that are mobile. And these two might be because you said this in the notes. It's just there. You don't have to tag it necessarily the way you used to have to tag things. And having it all in one place makes that part seamless. And just everything in one place, the notes, the pitch docs, the project plan, it all links back together. You do have to spend some time setting it up. I think the reason a lot of people try Notion and give up is it seems too complicated. So it takes some effort. But then once you set it up in the right way, it can really make the deal process a lot easier.

48:09Yes. A lot of efficiency, it sounds like. But definitely pitch M &A signs too. I know. That's a whole contact sales. They might reach out to you. That's usually how it works. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A couple of months after you're on the podcast, somebody at Deal Room Sales will reach out. love to see it. Maybe give me more ideas for ways to set up Notion better. It's interesting when you work with a really large corp dev team and their different functions have standardized on different project management tools. Oh, yeah. I feel like that's... We're really good at connecting diligence integration, but at a high level.

48:42But then when it turns into a plan that actually expands, okay, we got to migrate HubSpot to Salesforce and it turns into like 50 other tasks. Then it makes sense to plug it right into Notion. Yeah. And we're building those plugins. So hopefully you can still, people can use different tools. That's what we do. We'll plug them in and get them both together. Yeah. The data room environment and then boom. Yeah. We'll do a partnership. There you go. It started right here. The AI. Yeah. I was really impressed with how fast Notion adopted AI. That was insane. Just because I know the organization isn't like super small.

49:17We're a small company. We're 50 people. And for us to do stuff, it's so cool. Literally, they don't have a choice because I'm barking at them. But for Notion to do at scale and just it's matured really quickly. I'm curious about that part of, hey, here's like a company to move at speed, keep up with AI. But then as you think about the M &A and like just I'm struggling with it, just an AI for M &A. There's literally 100 companies right now that are trying to automate every little piece, use AI. And to be honest, a lot of them are struggling with traction just because you need a lot of data to really make some progress here.

49:53Right. How do you sort of look at it both organically and inorganically? It's nice that you're pushing it top down at your company. It's similar to Notion. Our founders had an early view of GPT 3.5, I believe, is the one that got released in November 2022. And the entire company was on a retreat in Cancun. And they saw the pre-release, locked themselves in a hotel room, and spent the next five days jamming on what can Notion be with AI. We were, I would say, one of the first at-scale SaaS companies to launch a product in GA. It was February of 2023 and started charging for it. And it was mostly individual users picking it up and trying it since we've shifted to more enterprises using it.

50:42But it was that kind of top-down understanding of what AI can do for the company, much less corp dev, but for the product. We've since launched a bunch of different AI. We have AI Writer, Database Autofill, like Search across different connectors, as we were talking about. And we have an AI agent that has been silently released. We're doing a big push on that in a few weeks. That's kind of the next iteration of how can I have AI use Notion to do my work for me? So it's not necessarily SaaS is going away. We're taking a piece out of that labor. We're having AI do the work for you in your software that already exists.

51:27And we're fortunate to be in a position where we're not these research labs competing for the bleeding edge AI researchers. as you've seen,$100 million packages, thankfully. We're building on top of all of these great models like OpenAI and Anthropic and iterating super quickly where something we tried six months ago that didn't work now works today with kind of the newest iteration of name your model. That's been really exciting. Pivoting to corporate development, we've tried to automate as much as possible with AI and that's allowed us to stay small We're a team of two. And corporate development, in addition to sourcing deals, we also do what I'll call competitive intelligence, just tracking what's in the news.

52:15We use AI for that, summarize it every week. Quarterly earnings of companies that we look up to or consider competitors, we'll just drop the earnings reports into Notion AI and it knows how we want to divide it up and what's in a report and we can just ship that to the company. It's been really exciting to see how AI is also shaping how you can do more as a corporate development person at your company. I like that. They're using AI to track the market. Yeah. The way you keep tabs on all these AI companies, you use AI to keep tabs on all the different AI companies. Yes. It's very recursive. It was also thinking back to that time AI is coming out.

52:52Do we need to go buy a bunch of AI companies to be at the forefront? Our recent acquihires have all been in the AI space. Every single founder that we've acquired has been put against our AI efforts. And it's been amazing because they iterate so quickly and have that scrappy founder mindset, which you need in this world of models changing every two minutes. That has also been helpful for us. Even though Notion wasn't originally thought of as an AI company, we're one of three AI companies on the Forbes AI 50 list that are not AI native, quote unquote, they're founded pre what I'll call the AI generation.

53:30And now we're seeing it become a huge part of our product. You've done talent acquisitions for AI. Yes. I was going to say, because tech is freaking expensive. Yes. You know, they've raised it 2050x multiplier. Yeah. It was definitely tough for a while when the initial funding wave came out and no one was interested in selling. And I think two things, valuations were so high that a lot of companies didn't find that traction. And then also, we've proven ourselves as an AI company. Our brand in the space is stronger now as a place folks who want to build AI for an at-scale user base can do that.

54:09And the way that our product is architected as building blocks, that's how we talk about Notion, as Lego blocks. It's all code. And AI uses code. And so you can literally use AI to do soon almost anything. Looking forward to it. it's like moving fast. So we got to hang on, keep up. I don't know if it's hang on. It's like you got to run faster to keep up. All of the above. Any parting advice for corp dev leaders that are looking to scale an M &A function in a growth environment? Yeah, I would say if you already know the basics of M &A and know how to run a process, it's truly about getting to know your counterparts at the company, the key stakeholders, what are their fears, what are their concerns, or maybe they're too eager and you have to talk them back, but get to know each person and what makes them tick so that you can best position yourself as an acquirer and as a home for that acquired company to be successful.

55:09It's funny, people say it's all about the people. It's about the people that you acquire and it's about the people internally. Yeah, I was just thinking about that. It's like both sides and it's like, really understand the psychology on both ends. It's tricky. Yeah. It is tricky. And knowing who's the best engineering leader to go do the technical diligence because not everyone has that same level of depth that they need to get to. And some people know the right questions to ask. You have to know enough to be dangerous as a corporate person, but then you go find the people that can do the deep technical diligence that you need.

55:40Other advice. Try to keep it small. Going back to this AI piece, see how much you can do with AI. It's not necessarily trying all the tools. Although definitely, if anyone has, maybe leave it in the comments, if anyone has really good AI tools they're using to source or to even do deals. One of the things that I found fascinating is that you're really active with the corporate development community. You helped organize different initiatives out here in the Bay Area and other things. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah. I organized what is now a Slack channel called CorpDevBreakfast, which is kind of a funny name.

56:14but it all started back in 2016 when I was again at LinkedIn. I was taking a friend from Uber CorpDev to breakfast at the office and ran into one of my colleagues who was taking his friend from Uber CorpDev to breakfast. We joined forces and just talked about on a high-level basis, what were we seeing, what were we struggling with? And we walked away from that breakfast thinking, that was so helpful. I wish we did this more. There's no community for CorpDev folks to share best practices. So every quarter, we started organizing breakfasts for people to get together. And it grew organically to the point where about a month before COVID hit, one of my friends at Google Corp Dev hosted the group and it was just too big.

56:59It was like 50 people showed up and we realized this is not going to work. And then COVID hit and we didn't have the breakfast anymore. And someone said, I really miss this community. How can we keep it going. That's when we spun up the Slack group. Now it's about 250 people and it's global because it's not limited just to the Bay Area tech companies, which is really nice. And the only requirements are that you have corp dev in your bio and you use a work email. So people will pose questions in the general channel. They'll post jobs that they're hiring for. They'll post resumes of folks that are looking for jobs in corp dev.

57:36It's a nice, safe place for people to feel like they have a community amongst the different companies who some of them may be competitors, but it's like we're all trying to help each other out. So all the people that reach out to me looking for jobs or hiring, I should just... Yeah, I'll post it. I'm going to send them to you. That's really good. I love hearing about it because it's something that I've noticed even with this podcast that there's a community. Maybe we've got to collaborate on an event actually. Yeah. The Friends of Snowflake. They got a great space over there that we could use.

58:04Okay, I'll call them up. We like doing it. having just a peer group. I think even as an early CEO founder, I used to do this in Chicago. We had these FinTech CEO roundtable. That's where I got the idea for the format that we currently do. Just six to 10 on the table. We're going to do intros. The next time around, what's the biggest challenge you currently face? And everybody weighs in on it. So now we just do that scale. We get 50 people, we break them in little pods of six or seven folks and just do the same format. That's awesome. Yeah, but that's the same thing. It's like the most valuable thing is just getting that peer network.

58:30And then you just got friends like, hey, I need your help. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Off the record. Yeah, let me tell you about the situation or I got this weird thing I'm trying to negotiate. I mean, I tell you even really early of what we're trying to look at in terms of thinking about M &A for a small company. It's so helpful. Yeah. The universe of problems is actually at the end of the day, quite small. And if enough people are in the room, they've all seen the same problem and can empathize or at least provide guidance. The best thing you can do for your career is listen to this podcast and get involved with a group of your peers.

59:03Yeah. So I got to ask you, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A? One of the craziest things that I saw was when a CEO didn't come along with the company. And it turned out after the fact that they had convinced everyone to sign and join by just making up imaginary outcomes for the employees, which required a lot of footwork on the back end. But this goes back to your question earlier. When have you seen integration go wrong, go off the rails? is when you don't bring on that leader because you don't know what the leader then told the team to get them to come on board. Does it have to sign like retention letters or offer letters?

59:40Kind of like, oh, you'll have pots of golden rainbows. And if you do this, and because the person you're talking to is generally the founder, you don't have insight into what they're telling their team. So that was pretty crazy. That was a crazy thing in M &A that I personally experienced. That is pretty wild. Yeah. Because you're on your way out. That's not good. That's so shady. I've seen some funny stuff on Twitter. Not that I've been a part of, but founders going off on their process on Twitter. So if I find any good threads, I'll share those. That'd be fun. Yeah. We got to start our own like M &A Lunatics thread on Reddit.

1:00:15I like that. I have some good ones. That'd be good. Yeah. Let's put it all down on this. Hillary, this has been great. I really appreciate taking a break from doing deals to have a conversation with me and helping me become a better M &A scientist. Yeah. It's great to talk about it. And it was great to have you here at Notion. and hopefully we can do it again. Thank you so much. If you were listening to this all the way to the end of the podcast, I salute you, the fellow M &A brothers and sisters out there. It takes some real dedication to listen to long-form content like this. I'd love to hear from you.

1:00:45Connect with me on LinkedIn. Love getting the feedback, different ideas for topics we haven't covered and the criticism. I'm used to that. So I'll take it, learn from it. So next time, here's to the deal.

1:01:08Thank 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.

1:01:53Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal. Thank you.