From Loom to Trello: How Atlassian Scales Through Smart M&A with Sarah Hughes

22:29You're playing the long game. And if you play the long game, you're doing things at the right time. And I think it's something I'm learning too, because I'm building pipeline for our business. But then some of these companies, maybe they're in a little trouble and they want to do something short term. And there's some that I don't know, you're thinking about selling, but you should still invest in building that relationship because you like the company. You see the potential there. And I think that's something I'm personally learning. Blasting's got a good reputation as an acquirer. if people can look back at historical interviews we've done with Alassian, there's a lot of good examples.

22:59And that's why I wanted to get a sense of that. It's just your approach and cultivating those relationships and how you look at it as more of a long game versus this is a transaction, are you going to sell or not? Yeah. In reality, I would love it to be a slightly shorter game maybe than six years. But I think sometimes that's the way the cookie crumbles. Do you get up where they're fast or they're just hot and ready and it's just... Yes. So I feel like almost I'm not doing my job well, though, if things are too fast because starting from zero and getting to an approval from our executive team and our board is hard in the span of 48 hours.

23:31Unless we're already ready for that. And it's something, it's just a pulling the trigger exercise at that point. That's when it goes well. We actually did a really quick and dirty analysis on a company that was coming to market a couple of weeks ago. And everything went extremely well. We were like, this is going to be fast. We need to make a decision by the end of the week. Everyone swarmed on it. I was really proud of the way the organization's formed on it. And we decided to pass. But it's hard to get comfortable with a deal that's sort of in the, call it half a billion dollars plus if we're not aware of and understand the business really well.

24:03That's a really good point. I mean, your pipeline, I track stuff where it's like, hey, this person is in the realm of selling for the right price, which is everybody does it. Now there's these companies, like the Loom example, where years and years, it was something you're super interested in. and liked the business, but it wasn't actionable. How do you view that in your pipeline? Is that just still in the pipeline or is it not? Is it just in the market map? We put it into a monitor bucket. Monitor bucket. And monitor generally means all of these are fuzzy, but monitor is usually where we try to, again, develop a relationship with the company, whether it's the corp dev team, we meet them every couple of quarters or the executive team or the product team.

24:44So we just keep an eye on them. We think through potential ways that we can work together. So when that time comes, we can actually be ready for it. Okay. Monitor bucket means once a quarter, we're going to be friendlies and check up with you and try to be helpful. I mean, the reality is there are so many companies right now in our monitor bucket. We don't check in with them all on a quarterly basis, but that's the goal. You got different tiers of monitor. Exactly. Monitor hot, monitor cold. Yeah, exactly. What's the biggest mistake M &A teams make when trying to convince founders to sell their company?

25:15Oof, there are a lot. But one that I would call out, I think we talked about it a little bit. And I've done this in the past. Sometimes companies will reach out and say, tell me everything about your business. Then they go away and then they come back and say, here's an offer. And then they go back and they say, okay, we're going to negotiate the definitive agreement. And then we close. And then here's the integration plan. Actually not bringing along the founders and the leadership team on that journey is a huge mistake. What I've tried to start doing in meetings is early diligence. our product leadership team also paints a vision about what our roadmap is.

25:48We can be pretty transparent on what we think, where we're headed and what we think the better together story is. And actually bring them into the conversation because we've seen sometimes founders will be like, actually, I don't think that's going to work because of X, Y, and Z technical reason or market reason, or we tried this and here's how the market responded. Have you thought about this? So making it more of a conversational, how can we build this narrative together is a really good best practice. that I've learned and I'm trying to implement in every deal we do. So keeping that founder along, I always think in my head, there's like a diligence work stream and there's integration planning work stream.

26:23Yeah. And what you're describing like teeters between the two. That's right. Because it's, hey, what's the vision? Like, where are we trying to go? You always prioritize where the value is around the diligence part. But then how are we going to actually make this happen? Where all of a sudden founders are pining on it saying, I don't think it's going to work. So I guess, how do you view that? In terms of where it fits in the process? Yeah. And even your process in general, am I thinking of it the right way? Because the way I always look at it when I work with different corporate teams is here's a work stream for diligence.

26:51Here's a work stream for integration planning. It sounds like it's more intertwined the way you describe it. I think so. I think of preterm sheet. This exercise looks like you have a management meeting, they present on what their business is, and then we do some presentation or some conversation back on why we're interested and what we're thinking about, where this business would potentially accrue value to our business. So that's kind of pre-term sheet. And I think as part of term sheet, we sit the founder down and walk through, here's why this is so valuable to us. And here's what you'd come in and do.

27:22And here's why we need you and the team. So we try to sell the vision as part of the term sheet process. And then when we get into diligence, yes, I would still bifurcate the two. We say, here are the 200 items that we need from you that are diligence items to check the box and confirmatory diligence. and then here is the plan for integration. And we set up a two-day workshop to walk through what the integration should look like. And that usually results in some sort of a vision doc that is co-authored by the CEO and our product sponsor. That is like, here's what we're doing. Here's what the first 90 days look like.

27:57Here's where the team fits in. Here's how we're going to integrate. Here's how we're going to get value in the first X months. I like that. Things always change. Strategy always changes. Everything changes probably day one after the deal anyway, but at least we have a starting point so that we can refer back to it and say, why did we do the deal and are we on track? And that's something you just broadly communicate with the organization. Yeah. We used it pretty effectively in Loom. Actually, we circulated it to our exec team, to our board. They circulated it internally to their team. So everyone knew here are the metrics for success.

28:29Here's what we're reporting out on. Here's what we expect. And here's how we're integrating it. Okay. So there's the thesis on why we're doing this deal. There's a bit about how Yeah, the why, the how, and the what, what we're expecting to get out of it. Which would include some of the metrics. Yeah, metrics. It's users, top line growth, etc. And ultimately, this is your deliverable from what you described, starting with that early management presentation, pre-LOI, where, hey, we're getting to know the team. We're doing just some initial, is this going to be a good fit working together? After drilling them with questions, then it's more, we want to share with you why this is going to be great together.

29:05And then you're working together to really clarify that vision to make sure that those executives are on board. And then you bring them along the diligence process where you really start shaping more outside the 200 items for diligence. Here's, let's talk through integration planning and really start refining what that initial integration thesis would pan out to be. Yeah. Or I guess vision documents, things more would use. Then it turns into that formal vision document that's presented by your founder. Yeah, that's generally the process. Again, all of these things are best practices and sometimes things are moving fast and we don't always get buttoned up on that.

29:38But that is the goal. I think it is important for the leadership of the target company to feel like they have co-authorship in that vision rather than an acquisition being something that's just happening to them. Bring them along, keep them engaged. Yeah. How do you think that expands with the broader team? I write a lot about ByerLed. I'm probably going to take quotes of this and put this in other content we have. And I've always felt Alasian has been such a prime example of it. The fact I did a podcast where Christina was heading up integration. Oh, yeah. So you have a CEO of an incoming company with your integration lead talking about how great integration went.

30:10I'm like, where does that ever happen? Referring on that, the fact that we can do a podcast and have an incoming CEO with your integration lead really talk about how the experience went and some of the lessons learned. To me, I was like such a unique and prime example of just taking lead as a buyer to really set things up for success. It just sounds like what you just described is the reason why. is it's really thinking about how things are going to come together, that transparency, and then engaging with that. Do you think that really expands overall from that founder, leader, getting that level of engagement that after you close, it lends to the broader team transitioning smoother?

30:50Because more times than not, there's always a metric from a lot of companies of just how much employee churn that they're tracking. And it just ends up being pretty significant. And it's almost expected. where it's really different than what you've cultivated over the years. Bringing the founder along on the journey helps with that a lot because they've sold a vision to their team to get them to join their startup. That vision is really good. And that's why people are excited about it. If they're excited about what they're going to do and what the company is going to do once they become part of Atlassian, for example, they will sell that vision again.

31:21And they'll be really instrumental on keeping people around and keeping people motivated. attrition is just a really hard thing because some people just didn't want to sign up to work at a big company. Actually just understanding there's going to be some breakage as part of this thing. And then how do we mitigate that, particularly if they're key employees, is our kind of plan B on that front. So that's a really good way to put it. It's the sort of vision to join the startup. But now here's a vision of partnering together and being better together with Alassian. Can the founder then sell that to the team that may not get 100 % acceptance, but it's fine.

31:57Yeah. They have to feel an ownership stake in that because when they own something, they are very, very good at bringing their team along. Awesome. How do you think about partnership and M &A as levers for ecosystem expansion rather than just feature expansion? I think that partnership is really important there. And actually, ventures has been a big part of our ecosystem expansion strategy, particularly when it comes to marketplace and distributing through our marketplace, because part of the rationale for investing in companies is that they will actually distribute their products through our marketplace, which just is a nice virtuous cycle because it makes our customers happier.

32:30Adding more apps gets more people to build on our platform and for our tools. It just has a really nice network effect for the rest of the business. You do actually pull that lever when you're looking at those venture deals and saying, hey, this would actually grow our ecosystem because if they grow, then the whole distribution grows. No, that's right. And we don't want to own everything. There are so many areas that we could go And we just have to be really careful about getting into every space. That's where our ecosystem really ends up impacting our overall strategy. This is related. So Atlassian competes with and partners with giants like Microsoft.

33:02How do you navigate that tension when evaluating potential deals or partnerships? Oh, yeah. The competition strategy. We understand that users are using a ton of different tools. And they're not going to just use Atlassian for everything that they need to do. They are going to be using Google Docs and Excel and Copilot and other things like that. I think where it makes sense is where we can be bringing context from our tools to them wherever they sit. That adds value to what they're doing. And then likewise, where we can bring context from other tools into Jira, into Confluence, into our system of tools.

33:37So it is really about adding customer value more so than trying to win. You think that's pretty accepted just in the industry of tech in terms of that view? or? It's a spectrum. We are probably on the more open end of that spectrum. But generally speaking, if you don't partner with the hyperscalers at some level, you're going to have a hard time. What do you call it? Co-opetition? Co-opetition. Co-opetition. Like cooperation and competition. Yeah. Co-opetition. I don't know if that's like an internal trademark that we have. We talked about culture fit being critical to an acquisition success. What happens when culture alignment isn't there?

34:12How do you mitigate that risk? Yeah, it's tricky. Culture is this sort of amorphous concept that I think is really hard to define and really hard to diligence and measure. It's something I constantly question and I would love for AI to figure out a way to do it effectively, but I have not yet. So if anybody has, please email me. There are some startups working on that. There are some startups working on that. Yeah, you're right. The data sources are tough. But with that said, I think it is the biggest risk of a deal in general because people are the most important part of any transaction, at least the ones that we do, because so much of the value of the deals that we do is post-close and it requires build-outs.

34:48The big risk there is that people will leave. The cultures are not aligned. If there's organ rejection from the rest of the company, people are going to leave and we won't be able to get the value of the acquisition. Diligence is really important. On that, we have to understand ways of working. We have to understand how flat or not flat the organization is, what their talent management strategy is, what their comp philosophy is, because all of that plays into how we onboard them. But then we really do try to take the best parts of their culture while assimilating them into Atlassian culture. Because at the end of the day, it will be more Atlassian culture than it will be their own culture.

35:25There's this part where you anticipate on influencing their culture to be more like broader Atlassian culture. Generally speaking, yes. So we fit them into the org chart. We get them onto our performance cycles A lot of the things that we do for career development and other things we institute at close or shortly thereafter. We don't name anybody, but what's like the worst case you've seen? Have you ever acquired a company that had anti-Elysian culture or something? I don't know. What's the worst case you've seen? Usually those end up being kind of deal breakers and they come out preterm sheet.

35:57So we haven't had a lot of cases that I would point out where the culture is so misaligned, where there's like a tops down mandate and it's very hierarchical or something like that. We have dealt with a lot of geos. Different geos have different cultural elements and work in different ways. For example, during Opsgenie, we acquired an office in Ankara. The founder's Turkish. It is just a different culture, different things that the office cares about. And we had to protect those while also being like, you're part of Atlassian now. I get it early on. You do avoid it. But then sometimes they're just you don't know what you don't know till after close.

36:37We've had a couple of cases in the past of founders not being a good fit or like leadership, maybe not like founders, CEOs, but elements of the company leadership not being a good fit and a tritting out pretty quickly, which we are protected. They don't get all of their like hold back or their retention. So we're actually not paying as much for the deal. But it is a bummer when that happens. Usually we are able to call that out as a risk before we close and come up with mitigation strategies around it. But that's where I've seen it play out. A lot of transparency. You guys still have everything, your term sheet published publicly?

37:11We do, yeah. We do. And we haven't... I first was very skeptical about it, but it's been really good. It has helped our negotiating process a lot. Surprisingly. Alassian is known for a clean, disciplined integration. What are the first 90 days post-close focused on? How do you balance speed and withalignment? integration is the hardest thing that we do at Atlassian. On the M &A side, it's very dependent on the type of deal we do, the strategy behind it, and then how we want to get value from it. But generally for one of the larger deals, it is a first do no harm. So make sure that we're protecting the growth of the business, the customer base, making sure the employees don't have too much whiplash when they come in.

37:54And then it is get all of our back office systems integrated. We start that from day one. We want to get everyone on our commerce platform and on our identity stack so that we can start selling it. That's kind of thing too. And we can do that usually in the first six to nine months, but that's a big platform lift. And then we want to make sure that we're aligned around actually pricing and packaging the deal so that we can cut customers over or introduce new bundles to get the value out of the deal. It's a go-to-market. I heard your integration plan is just open for anybody to look at. That is true.

38:27Is that not standard at a company? Obviously, some of the HR elements are not open, But generally speaking, it flows from that vision. I haven't heard of companies that just put it there for anybody to look at. We're a pretty open company. We're pretty transparent internally. We wrote all these agile playbooks. Yeah, we wrote. Our term sheet is out there on the open web, for example. It helps because people need to be brought along on the journey internally on our side and on the company's side. A lot of people have a lot of ideas about how we should integrate the business or that we've already been through and made decisions around.

39:01Actually being able to put that into writing and be like, here's what we're doing helps everyone get on the same page. I don't see too many downsides to doing that. But I'm curious if you have any kind of horror stories. Just you don't hear about it that often. There's usually walls over. You mind if I ask some personal questions about how you do integration? I'm curious about the structure because I feel like there's so many ways to configure corp dev in general. But how do you configure integration? Is it you run the typical IMO model? Is it completely separate in its own? Is it part of corporate development?

39:34Does it report into corporate development? Does it report out somewhere else? What does that structure look like? Yeah, it does report into corporate dev. So we have an IMO. It's a small team. It's two people. And my entire team is about 15. So it's a pretty small element of it. And they're really the quarterbacks of the integration. They're managing things. We actually use JIRA for our integration. I've actually seen the setup because I would compare notes because we build stuff in Dealroom. And at some point, that's another little thing because we're always like, we need to integrate this because we do all this stuff pre-LOI.

40:03It's a good project management tool for us to use. The way you have it set up, the way it's like, well, it's cool and it's hard to visualize it, but it's nested in a way that you can put such a comprehensive plan and have it start off looking so simple, but then dig to every nuance detail you want. It is very useful. So those two people really spearhead the integration, but we have cross-functional teams that are actually the DRIs for getting the work done. And then usually about after a year, we roll into business as usual. For larger transactions, we will usually do three years of reporting out to the board.

40:36Is there an actual handoff that, hey, day one happens and it's the IMO that's in charge of integration. And then when you roll off, they're handing it off to the business unit and they're in charge. Is that what it looks like or is it different? I would say it's less formal than that because there are certain areas that we want to engage on longer term if there are hotspots that the team wants to keep an eye on. And some areas just get rolled into business as usual much faster. But we generally for a year have an integration meeting weekly with the kind of constituent stakeholders that's led by the IMO.

41:13They're managing it, but at the end of the day, integration is practically led in the business. In the business, yeah. So they're essentially guiding that whole work streams. I think that's kind of the right way to do it. You do need connectivity to corp dev because the integration leads really get involved early on so that they can understand where risks might lie and they need to be involved in the process from the beginning. You need them to continue to sit there and play that role. And then they have seen all of these. They have pattern recognition. They understand how to get things done in the business that different teams might not.

41:47But at the end of the day, the teams need to own the outcomes because they are the ones who actually own the product strategy. Yes, that would be interesting. Maybe at some point comparing notes to the integration lead and just look at like the different configurations. Because I feel like when you even say IMO, people have a different perception of what that actually means. That's a good point too. Next podcast, we'll break down the IMO. I got to talk about AI because obviously you're looking at... These days, that's a big, that is an actual question. Yeah, that's a good point. What are you buying?

42:18Is it just a sequence of prompts here? Is there some real technology? what is AI? Big buzzword. You already gave me some examples of how you're using AI on your deal process. Pretty interesting. You're using it for market mapping. And then you also mentioned just some of the messaging or getting your prep for outreach. You got a one pager built around that company. You got some of these key points and you're really prepped to have that conversation with them. Any other areas that you're using AI in the deal process? Yeah, I've been using it a lot on the sourcing, like this sort of preterm sheet diligence side, especially understanding market maps.

42:54So that's kind of thing one for me right now. We're doing a more comprehensive analysis of the diligence process itself. There are so many ways that AI can actually help drive efficiencies in that process. And while we're moving really fast for deals, it ends up being useful for things like going through a thousand contracts and being like, here are the five terms that we care about that are red flags for us. Let's call them out. Let's figure out how we deal with them. That's just one example. So a cross - Contract review, yeah. Yeah, a contract review. There's other stuff. On the integration planning side, we're thinking through like, make a first draft of things like employee comms, customer comms, that vision doc that I mentioned, even the integration plan.

43:36There are a lot of first draft areas that AI can be extremely useful. And then after the deal, we haven't thought quite as much about that because again, it gets federated. Yeah, they'll have their own ways. Yeah, exactly. But the content drafting is definitely one. I mean, I do that all the time. These are really good examples. Where do you see things going? Like, how do you envision the corp def function changing or evolving the next five years? It's going to be interesting. When I talk to people, everybody's sort of in the camp that I am where they're like, yeah, I'm finding it useful. I'm starting to see the value of it.

44:08It's still early days. But I actually think that in the future, it's going to be way easier to go through the kind of like confirmatory diligence process because it will be like, hey, like hook this thing up to your systems. We have this list of 200 items that we need for diligence. Go find them, return them, put them into a data room. You can check them. Give you your finding summary. Give you a finding summary. I think that a lot of that will get... Give me a mitigation plan. Exactly. Exactly. Knowing what you know about our organization, figure out the mitigation, figure out who should own it.

44:39I don't think we're at the point where people would be comfortable just saying then go do it, but maybe we'll get there. Yeah, maybe that's the five to 10 year mark that will run the execution. Yeah. Those are fair. I'm really excited about it too. Even our business, we're sort of doing a lot of experimentation and how to use AI and different parts of diligence. Yeah. I'm curious about when going back to your core corp dev function, how do you look at AI just impacting that? I'm particularly curious, is it, hey, we're acknowledging every company slapping AI into their product in some shape or form.

45:09And we just try to understand what that actually means, if it's really a game changer or not. On one side, the other side is, do you have another work stream or market map just around AI products alone that you're starting to look at? Now you got to expand that market map with just all this ecosystem of AI products that maybe are just AI first entering and disrupting. So your first question was around how it will impact corp dev teams and departments. Which is more like, how do you look at the landscape? Because like I said, the challenge I have is everybody's saying AI. Every landing page right now is AI.

45:41I look at it as, okay, there's all these products that are now adding AI. And then it's getting a sense of what does that actually mean? And then there's this ecosystem of the new products that are coming in as AI first. And that's where I was curious of how do you look at that whole ecosystem? Are you bucketing those new tools under the same market map? Or do you create a new market map for all these emerging AI tools? It's more around the job to be done. What does the future of the software development lifecycle look like? Jira is a huge part of it today. What are the ways that SDLC is going to be upended in the future?

46:11and what are things we need to buy into? Who's doing that now? Where do we think they're headed? Where is this going to end up? So it's looking around corners for each of our kind of collections that we offer and seeing what the future of those collections looks like. We do market maps based on that. I would say now there's no market map that doesn't have 90 % AI companies that we're doing today or any of the spaces that we're engaged in. And I like that framing, the jobs you've done, because then you stay true to looking at the ICPs and what is the actual solution delivering for them? They never pan out as expected.

46:43There's always something that happens. There have been deals that I've done in the past that have felt too confrontational, like an us versus them mentality. And I definitely was part of that issue. And I think that the lesson that I learned from, I'm thinking of one or two deals where it just felt like the founders were really emotional. They were really angry by the end of the process. And I was really annoyed with them because I couldn't see why they were being so angry and emotional. What I learned from that is that it's really important to just treat founders like your teammates because at the end of the day, they're going to be your teammates after the deal closes.

47:18That's one of the great things about working in M &A and instead of working in iBanking or something like that, you actually follow the deal through and you get to work with these people. It's really important from the get-go to set up the deal. Hey, this is a challenge that we are facing together. We're on a crew team. We're not in a boxing ring kind of mentality. I could have done more in the past to set that up just from the get-go and then treat the deal that way. That, hey, we're going to be like getting married and we're going to be partners together. Yeah, exactly. It's like a marriage.

47:48Yeah, so we can't have the us versus them. Right. So there will be challenging conversations. There are going to be things we disagree on, but we have to remember at the end of the day, we're on the same team rather than on opposing teams. That's a good one. It's easy to forget that. Rob Brown was reminding me of just putting yourself in the other person's shoes when negotiating these deals. I think that's a big part of it too. And those are like easy things to forget because you're just in your day-to-day mindset. No, that's right. Yeah. And we've seen hundreds of these, but a founder generally has seen, it could be their first M &A deal or their first time being acquired or their second.

48:21They're not going through tens of these in their lifetimes probably, but it's a lot scarier for them. As M &A people, we should always remember that. That's true. I'm kind of rethinking some of the situations where I shied away from a deal. I felt like it was feeling too transactional where I wanted it to be more meaningful to have assurance that if we got a deal done, it was going to go smooth. It was just too much of give me the price. I want to know the terms. And yeah, that's a tough one. Transparency is really important to deal with that. That's why this isn't easy. I know. Any other big lessons you've learned that have changed how you approach M &A today?

48:58Lots and lots of micro lessons. I learned them in every deal. But once the AI bot gets activated, that gets all your historical emails, black messages. I'll make sure just to put a prompt. Give me all the lessons learned. Yeah, I can just ask it what my lessons are. Give me a list. And then I'll have AI just read it off. I don't have to do it myself. We actually don't even need to be sitting here. And we can have just the two AIs. So they can just have a conversation on that list with each other. It'd probably be really fun. You ever played with Notebook LM? Not a ton. Because we actually don't support it internally for our work stuff.

49:30So it's only been in my spare time. I put a hundred podcast interview transcripts in there. And it's just the whole conversation thing it does with AI is such a trip. So wild. Yeah. It is. It wasn't... It was good and impressive. But you could tell when you put that much data in. And I think that's the struggle right now is you put that much. It gets things off. It was like misquoting the wrong person. Because I know so-and-so didn't say that. But it was pretty interesting where things are going. Any advice you'd give M18s looking to build better deal flow or execute more successful deals? Send all of your good companies to Atlassian.

50:05The advice I have is to really build your network. I've relied a lot on my network of VC friends, bankers for really good insights on the market. So crowdsource a lot of things. The second one would be relentlessly drive internal alignment. internal alignment is really hard to get to. Focusing on that is a good way to trust build internally. And then the third one, CorpDev people having an outside-in perspective on a market and a business is a really important data point for product teams as they're making decisions rather than just being execution engines of deals. These are only areas we're very proactive in that make you successful and other CorpDev leaders, but the networking piece, that's like being proactive about finding the opportunities, the relationship part, get ahead of those.

50:57The internal alignment, it often gets forgot about because that can take up a lot of time and effort. But being as proactive on internal alignment. And then that third area of that perspective, because I like how you framed it that way of you're basically bringing that outside-in perspective, which could open up some eyes for some folks internally. Yeah. I got to ask one thing. What's the craziest thing you see in every day? I feel like I've seen some pretty crazy stuff come out with background checks when we do background checks on founders. You don't have to name anybody, but what's the craziest thing you've seen on a background check?

51:29Generally, drug use, not paying taxes. Those are two that have come up. Sounds like pretty typical things you'd find. Not like murder or something. Not murder. I've never come across a murder. Light manslaughter once or twice. No crazy behavior after a deal closes. People get a big check and they just... And they just bounce. One of the deals that I heard about, I don't have first-hand knowledge, but one of the deals I heard about was this founder who got acquired, made something like$50 million or something in the deal, but it was all in retention and just bounced and went to his house on the Cape and never showed up to work again.

52:08and they had a really hard time firing him because he had a lot of protections around his equity payouts. We have a lot more structure in place around people showing up for work. Yeah, their attention, but he just was pretty loose and got over without doing anything. Yeah. Good to know. That's pretty crazy. But nothing totally insane. This has been a great conversation. This has been fun. I learned a lot. Helped me become a better M &A scientist. Those of you still listening, you are also a fellow M &A scientist. I value and appreciate you. I love to hear feedback. Let me know what you think of this interview.

52:43If you got any other ideas, topics, suggestions, reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'll take the criticism as well. That's how I get better at this. Till next time, here's to the deal.

53:05Thank 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.

53:50Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

54:04Views 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 and is...