Partner Before You Buy: The Pre-Acquisition Strategy Corp Dev Teams Skip

22:05I want to get back into when you think about mapping this market, you kind of mentioned that open-minded. Is there any other specifics of how you decide what are you going to push towards a formal partnership versus who's staying on this watch list?

22:18Tomer Stavitsky:Aside from the readiness and the willingness of the target company and their potential owners, whether they're independent and leadership or investors on the company or it's a PE firm, we have to consider the internal dynamics of the company itself. Is the company that the corporate development function is working for, is the company itself ready to basically absorb the company that we're trying to eventually acquire? There could be a situation where the company itself is just overwhelmed or distracted with other stuff at the moment. Also, some like leadership changes or changes in the marketplace or new product launches.

22:54Tomer Stavitsky:And it just might not be best suited right now to basically absorb the company. that would sort of lead you towards saying, hey, let's partner with this company because it's going to be different functions that may evolve. If you're a priority company, you're going to need to integrate it. In some cases, the integration function and some of these companies where you start up corporate development again, whether you build it from what was already built in the past or you started new, the integration function might not even exist or it could exist, but somebody's maybe doing it part-time. So there's all sorts of flavors in the world.

23:26Tomer Stavitsky:As a corp dev person, our role is essentially to assess the situation both internally and externally, and basically decide on the best combination. That's where you would decide, am I going to do an investment? Am I going to do a partnership? Am I going to do an M &A? It's taking all this information together, diagnosing the situation, I said, corporate development doctor, and essentially trying to make the best decision with what you have right now. And then it's also about showing people the options, showing people internally the options and getting them essentially on board with that. So it's not about who has the loudest voice in the room.

24:04Tomer Stavitsky:It's about being able to present a variety of options and then make a decision that's best for the company and also best for the target. You're trying to find a balance, essentially. I want to dig into this optionality. Again, I'm using my software cap. I'm thinking of deal room. We think of different software partners. And a big one is always private company data. You've always want to integrate private company data. Where do you get this partnership to do deep integration? And I feel like there's always several options there and things change. Somebody maybe lead, somebody's neck and neck with another.

24:33What do you do in that point when there's like two or three potential partners? Do you try to warm them up without signaling who was like the real target? Yeah. What's your strategy there?

24:42Tomer Stavitsky:In an ideal situation, if I had the right resources at my disposal for a company I would work for, I would try to, at all points of time, keep two to three targets warm. because what ends up happening, and again, there's different flavors. Some corporate development teams, I see they're like really enthusiastic. Let's say the business is really enthusiastic about one of these three companies, or maybe they just found one company. So then they go around this process where they basically diligence the company. They get all excited. They say, okay, let's do a deal. And then for some reason, the deal falls apart.

25:18Tomer Stavitsky:So before you know it, they went through six to 12 months and even sometimes more. and now they're back to the drawing board. Now they need to go out and find more companies as backup. And sometimes what people would find is that some of these other companies that people talked about a year ago, they're already either not on the table anymore or they're uninterested or they went bankrupt or yeah, they could be available. To me, it's sort of a gamble that sometimes teams take and maybe they don't do it in a very deliberate way. Maybe they're just thinking, okay, this deal is going to work. I'm sure it's going to work.

25:52Tomer Stavitsky:So we're going to go with it. The point is trying to keep a couple of targets warm. It really depends on your approach for the space. Tactile Web Software is going to take this example. Let's say, for example, you're building an ecosystem. Let's say you're a medical device company and you're building an ecosystem, and then you're inviting players to basically participate in your ecosystem. You're basically giving them channel access and you're giving them the opportunity to basically work with your own customers. So if it were me in this particular case, I would maybe choose a couple of the areas that really matter to me.

26:28Tomer Stavitsky:And I would pick one strategic partner or maybe a couple of these areas. But there is going to be areas where you're not going to want to pick one company. You're going to want to let a variety of players choose where the solution itself is more generic, potentially. You don't want to commit to anybody. So in this kind of case, if you ask me, this is the approach I'll take. But it could be a different case where there's no ecosystem. You're just trying to find like the best tech to actually integrate to your own tech set. Again, barring from software. So there you really have to think hard. And you would probably need to commit to one of these three companies.

27:04Tomer Stavitsky:You don't necessarily need to say to these other companies, we committed to someone. It's up to you. It's about being able to keep the optionality when you're actually not 100 % sure that something's going to succeed. So there's like a lot of nuances here. If you're already past the hump, if you're like already commercial with something and you're seeing great uptake, then maybe it's time to say to the other parties, hey, we partnered with somebody, right? You don't have to say who it is unless it's public. It's all confidential information at the end of the day, but it depends on the stage, right?

27:36Tomer Stavitsky:So development stage, I'll probably keep the other people all more close because development could fail. But if you see commercial uptake, there might be not necessarily a need to keep them more at this particular point in time. Essentially, there's multiple factors. There's keeping optionality. You have a higher probability of getting a deal done. Then there's optionality and just the nature of this partnership. If there's more of a commoditized technology, and it's like, okay, it only makes sense, where if it's very unique. And then I guess that's where I wanted to bring in using exclusivity as a tool or as a protective motion.

28:08How would you think through that in conjunction with trying to have different partnerships in those different scenarios?

28:15Tomer Stavitsky:Maybe borrowing from this ecosystem example we talked about a minute or two ago, imagine we're identifying a couple of sub-areas. Let's take like a medical device. So let's say we have a 3D imaging space. We understand 3D imaging is very important to us in this particular scenario. So we want to essentially be able to be exclusive, be able to maintain accessibility with this particular partner. So we essentially tell them that you're going to be exclusive. we need your exclusivity because this is important to us we're gonna have potentially so-and-so volumes so i can see the other side basically asking for some kind of volume commitment typically the large companies would want to avoid it because they might be paying for exclusivity a different way like through development funds but there could be also situations where the company is maybe not paying too much for redevelopment so then they can say okay i'm gonna be able to commit to 100 ,000 scans at so-and-so dollar amounts every year.

29:14Tomer Stavitsky:If we don't meet these numbers, then we have a certain timeframe to basically cure it. If we're not able to actually cure it, then we essentially shift to a non-exclusive mode. So it doesn't mean the parties stop working together. It just means that there is something that's non-exclusive where the other party can go and work with the competitor, for example. I was starting to think about these situations where the signaling of, hey, we're doing this partnership or we're doing this partnership because we eventually want to buy you. A bigger component of the signaling is if you're actually investing with that relationship of it too.

29:48Just being on the other side of the deal because then it's obviously very clear. And then you also mentioned that commitment part. Hey, if we are doing this down the road, we can at least have this expectation of what value was generated from this partnership and have some metric if this was successful or not. And then maybe that ties to that first-round refusal.

30:08Tomer Stavitsky:Yeah, it does. I mean, in this example, we took like a big corporation and maybe a small or medium-sized company on the other side. But in this particular example, it also really matters how much the big company is actually moving forward with pushing, or should I say promoting, the other targets that technology are offering within its ecosystem. So you can pretty clearly see big companies typically move slow, but after a certain period of time completely clearly to see if there's commitment in there. So it's almost like the story tells itself. If the big company promotes very significantly the other company solution and sort of talks about it and I don't know, it's customer then, it's conferences, you know, whatever, and they do co-promotion, then it's going to be pretty clear that there is a lot of value here.

30:53Tomer Stavitsky:There could be an acquisition down the road if there was an investment in the beginning, but the tough situation is where it's not pretty clear. Like the big company is almost promoting it, it's not promoting it enough. It's up again for the corporate development person. And hopefully the corp dev person is still involved in some capacity in these deals as they become operational and go to the business. Corp dev person, I find, can play a really nice role in sort of making sure that things are taken correctly. So this is where it could be interesting to consider. And again, not all companies do this.

31:26Tomer Stavitsky:But in these investment slash development slash commercial deals, it might be beneficial in certain situations to have sort of a, I'll say integration function, like you have in an M &A situation, because the corp dev person or this integration person, they can bring a different perspective to the situation. Like, how are we thinking about the next step? Sometimes I find companies that they're basically executing for that particular stage. Not necessarily thinking about, hey, we said initially in the deal thesis, we want to potentially acquire this company. So they're only executing for their specific part.

32:00And this is where these kind of deals could fail, Kisan, if they don't get like the right plundering or guidance. So this is like taking the same buyer-led principles. Like you want to see this all the way through and you want to bring those thinking in the front end. This still applies in this partnership model. You know, hey, how are we taking this technology to market? How are we, if we're going to incorporate it, if we do go exclusive and having that thinking all the way through. Okay, so that's a key part. You want to have those integration leads involved with this just as well as you would on the M &A deal, I guess.

32:33Tomer Stavitsky:Essentially, just to clarify one more point. Yes, you do want to have that integration function, but you want to be obviously mindful about it, right? Because, you know, CorpDev is a function. They have a lot of deal work, a lot of strategy work. You don't necessarily have the time to go into each and every partnership or investment and be active at it. So you need to be very mindful, you know, how much energy and time you spend. A good model could be to have the corporate development function essentially coach or maybe guide or mentor the functions that sort of act as like the integration or project manager in these roles and just sort of inject to them the thinking that, hey, this is what we're doing this for.

33:09Tomer Stavitsky:It's not only about this particular stage. There's also a bunch of other stages. We might acquire these companies. Just be mindful towards this and what we're transmitting, what we're signaling to the outside interactions, whether directly or indirectly. What's your sentiment on how you should direct with this company about it? I feel people get excited just to even early stage company partnering with a large company. They get excited about that and they don't maybe have as much understanding of how you think about it in terms of the sort of assessment of partner build versus buy. I like to be a little bit more forthcoming with the target.

33:44Tomer Stavitsky:Obviously, there is a level of how much forthcoming you can be. When I approach situations with targets, especially when they're young companies, young startups, I try to basically explain to them what are we trying to do big picture. Again, I can't share every single detail because there's a lot of confidentiality and a lot of things. But I try in general to explain, hey, this is what we're building towards. Let's say we have this ecosystem. This is where we see you essentially fitting in. We think it's actually going to help you achieve X. We think it's going to help us achieve Y. We're really excited about this.

34:18Tomer Stavitsky:We see so-and-so potential. It's going to help us do so-and-so, right? Not giving you any concrete details here, but it's more of a framework of how I look at the situation with the target. If they want to be acquired, that's their desire. I'm going to be forthcoming with them. I'm going to tell them, hey, we need to do X, Y, Z. Like we need to test your tech. We need to test market acceptance, market adoption. We need to see that actually revenues are coming in. We need to see that there is scale to this particular situation, you know, after we do these things, and obviously there's a lot of in-between.

34:50Tomer Stavitsky:So I also do the in-between with the target. So after we do all these things, we can proceed to do the deal negotiations for acquisition, if that makes sense for both sides. I understand this, like working with a business. Go back to a situation where they have a private equity or even VC owner behind the scenes. I want to understand how do you sort of triangulate that relationship or not? Are you just primarily working with the business, trying to validate thesis of the deal itself? You know, are you sort of back-channeling to understand the perspective and timelines of their parents, but the private equity ownership?

35:25And what does that look like?

35:26Tomer Stavitsky:Yes, you actually do a dialogue with basically all these parts of the equation, but the dialogue doesn't need to necessarily be the same. Let's say, for example, if the company itself is a little bit more detailed, it's more operational. If, say, for example, you started activating the partnership, You've actually started selling the products in the market or the service or the software, whatever it is. And you sell them on that vision, especially when it comes to the leadership of that company. And you sort of like have periodical touch points with them. How is this situation, whether it's partnership investment, whatever it is, how is it going?

35:59Tomer Stavitsky:So you serve as a corporate development leader as almost the escalation point for the teams to do the day to day. You can help with all sorts of things. The financial system is not capturing things correctly. So let's escalate it to finance. We're not doing the technical integration with the products, right? Let's escalate this to maybe one of the directors or maybe even the chief product officer, if it's important enough. So we sort of serve in that escalation point. And then with the owners, you know, let's say they're a private equity firm, you talk about things bigger picture. With them, you align on if they're supportive of this and you're interested in this, you align on the acquisition case.

36:38Tomer Stavitsky:So you start talking and basically monitoring the situation throughout this cadence of the process. You tell them, OK, this is, let's say, for example, this is where we are now with testing the product. You know, we've seen such and such things. We're on a timeline to move towards the next stage where we'll do market adoption testing and we'll size the market. So you're sort of like building into your vision in a more high level way where there is a working level of the company itself. And obviously with the leadership, if interacting with, say, for example, the CEO of the target, then you say things that are similar to what you say to the P.E.

37:16Tomer Stavitsky:owners. But obviously there is a level of difference between the things you'll say. Maybe you won't start talking about the numbers of exits and stuff like that with the CEO just yet. You need to first run it by the P.E. owners and then it's filtering down to them. Again, just to stress, you have to sort of manage all the different parties to get towards the end goal. And you have to make sure people are like aware of these chats. People don't think you're saying one thing to one party and a different thing to the other party. So it's also about making that connection, right? And making sure information is free flowing and they're talking to each other.

37:50Tomer Stavitsky:And there's going to be some meetings where you're going to have the P owner and the leadership of the company. So it's about orchestrating all this thing towards completion. Yeah, and just different perspectives. Private equity is probably going to have a mature view on what their investment horizon timeline is. Something that you can manicure. Obviously, they would probably be pretty incentivized or motivated about a strategic acquiring something in their portfolio. So there's some interesting angles there. Can you tell me a story? Walk me through. I know you worked on some really cool deals, but I'd love to just hear about how this actually played out in the real world.

38:22What specific examples? Just like this partner to acquire. When you actually did this, where you partnered up, what were the key things that went well? If there's things that didn't go well, you still got the deal done.

38:31Tomer Stavitsky:I'll give you an example of a software company that we first partnered with with one of my previous employers. And then we sort of acquired it after a certain time. So we started by actually seeing what the technology is about, how it actually feeds into the market with customers. We saw that there is interest. Let's say we identify the four segments of the market for this particular company and work for, four opportunities for use cases. So then we kind of saw, okay, there is some pretty good update for, let's say, one of the four use cases. However, we didn't necessarily care as a company about this use case, if that makes sense.

39:09Tomer Stavitsky:We cared more about the three out of the four. So we identified that these three other use cases, they actually seal gaps for us from a technology perspective and allow the company that I work for to become more competitive. And there was actually a straight line we found between these three use cases and our ability to actually grow the business of this company and also help our customers along the way. For this first one, it's more of an adjacency, if that makes sense. So therefore, buying that particular company at that particular point in time didn't make a ton of sense because you'll be paying for stuff that you don't necessarily need.

39:47Tomer Stavitsky:there was also no ability to actually divest it at that particular point in time. Unfortunately, there was just no interest for that particular asset in the market. So what we ended up doing, we ended up actually starting mapping out a partnership option. We built a financial model the way every corporate development team does. We identified the size of the pie. We found some pretty nice synergies for us to basically just slot this product and even just go out and sell it. So we found that we can just take the other company's product and just go out to hospital customers and basically just sell this product.

40:21Tomer Stavitsky:We didn't necessarily even have to do a tech integration. So we started with that. And then we also implemented a light integration approach. It doesn't get us to commit to this particular company that would bring even more value to our customers. So this is where we actually charge for that integration. So there's actually like some kind of SaaS component in this as well. This was a hardware play. with a fast component. So we ended up actually proving out the value over a certain period of time. It was around a year and a half and actually stayed close to this deal again, just to demonstrate the approach I was telling you about earlier, where a corporate person kind of stays close to things to make sure they tick.

41:02Tomer Stavitsky:There were multiple times where I played a role to basically escalate things and give the big picture view to remind people what are we trying to do? Because at the end of the day, I was building this up as a situation where we're going to buy this company if we prove out commercial success and also the slight integration success. The people in the team, again, they don't always remember this on the operational level. I had to escalate various things around, hey, how's the integration going? Is it getting integrated correctly? Are we scaling this integration for our customers? There was always also some hiccups.

41:34Tomer Stavitsky:And by staying close to it, I was able to sort of escalate it to the relevant colleagues to get things moving. Things ended up delaying a little bit, but in this particular instance, the commercial success and the technical success was good enough to actually justify buying the company. And by the way, we also negotiated a right of first refusal. This actually became a semi-competitive situation where somebody else wanted to go out and buy this company. So then we talked about potentially carving out that business that now became much more significant for these three out of the four use cases.

42:08Tomer Stavitsky:We ended up understanding it's not going to be possible or worth anybody's time. And the other company wanted to just buy the whole thing. So we ended up making a bid by this company and we ended up integrating it for that particular business I work for. It ended up working well. But, you know, I think the reason it worked well is only because the corp that function basically stayed close to things and didn't fall into the trap of just handing over everything, and basically letting things run. And yeah, sometimes it happens, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But in this instance, it worked.

42:41That's a great example. One of the things I was thinking about is like that conversion from partnership and acquisition. And you had a good example of like the case where here's some turbulent because now it got competitive and you still had to fight that case to validate enough that it was compelling to do the deal. What do you see as like the most common mistakes when it comes to converting the partnership into an acquisition?

43:03Tomer Stavitsky:Probably the most common mistake is choosing not the right timeframe to do this particular thing. So you can find situations where people are like very excited and they say, okay, I have enough proof points, but I'm only like halfway throughout the process. Let's say we said we're going to make this decision at the end of, I don't know, like a year and a half. Okay. Whatever the situation will be, we'll make the decision then. So now, you know, somebody with like a very strong voice in the business comes and says, okay, now I know we're only like six months through. I'm already seeing such a nice adoption with so-and-so customers.

43:37Tomer Stavitsky:So I'm pretty sure it's going to work with a hundred other customers, let's say. This is somewhat of a risky decision. We haven't talked necessarily to these$100 customers. Sample set is pretty small. We're pretty early in the process. And sometimes people with the biggest voice in the room can just get a decision made. It's just the reality of business. So this is where I see companies make sometimes misjudgments. And yeah, sometimes it works. Sometimes it works. Unfortunately, often it doesn't. So to me, it's about finding that fine balance. I'm not saying let's wait years and years, but let's find this right set of proof points and let's design the process in the beginning.

44:16Tomer Stavitsky:So we actually don't only seek out 10 customers. We seek out a little bit more. We need to define between ourselves and the company, what is sufficient scale and what is the right time frame to actually hit that button and say, okay, let's go ahead and become a closer to the company. That's a huge point. Like you just can't predetermine the timeline and really want to look for some evidence that makes sure it's worth buying. I do want to talk about the application of this partner first approach across industries, because obviously you've worked across a variety of industry. I'm more on the software focus.

44:50And even when I look at this current market where it's just very, every conversation's got the word. Everybody knows the two letters. And it's just constantly AI, AI, AI, AI, AI. But the thing is about here, we're going through a big hype cycle. Like I've seen it in the last year I was CEO at Dealroom. There's like a hundred point solutions that's AI or X and M &A. And I'm like, okay, I've seen this before. We've seen this movie with the blockchain companies, with the crowdfunding and give this cycle like two, three years out, it can foresee there's going to be a number of these like zombie one to three million companies out there, which I know that's going to get written off because they're just raising unbelievable amounts of money.

45:30But I think there's some value to collect out of them. So that's where you keep them at bay. And I'm wondering, like, is this an example? Is there a partner model that applies in that situation? And then also maybe closer to the example you gave earlier, when I look at here's a business where we have a lot of success in selling into corporate development and we're very ambitious about adjacencies like the private equity and the investment banking. And we see providers that sell maybe like a pipeline type of CRM solution into those spaces. And then that's a thesis. Like, hey, can we buy one of those products to accelerate or go to market?

46:04Because now we're selling a full life cycle solution to those companies from a single point solution. Is that another good situation for a partner first approach? So that's where I get some free advice out of you.

46:15Tomer Stavitsky:Yeah, it very well could be Kisan. So it really depends on, I think I want to say, how certain are you and the risk functions that compose your business, product, technology, sales. This is like the way to go. So you have to be certain that this is the one company that could actually achieve what you want. So I'll say it's probably good to go back and basically chart what's your outlook with this company, not only a financial model. Do you feel like this company is situated to actually develop version two, version three, version four, version five, or maybe they're just like the current version and you're going to milk it out and you need some other people or some other tech to get you to the future?

46:56Tomer Stavitsky:To me, it's making sure that this is sellable. This is upgradable. They have a relatively good reputation in the marketplace. You have the ability to help them increase their business, essentially, for your existing channels or some new channels you're going to get in. So it's sort of like the cohesive picture needs to take a lot of bucks. And you need to look at it really, I'll say, not with like green glasses. You need to inject some devil advocate into this entire process. Don't just rely on just, let's say, your chief product officer perspective or a CTO's perspective. Also inject some what could go wrong perspectives.

47:33Tomer Stavitsky:Then once you have all this information, it's almost like you become this AI model and you try to make sense of everything, right? In the end of the day, you're still making a decision, for better or worse. But this is something I've seen happen more than once. I'm finding that some teams, they just become so excited about something, they potentially not do a 360 sort of diligence. And they say, OK, yeah, this is great. These functions told me this is awesome. Let's just go with it. You spoke about AI, so I'm just going to make this come out of AI. Sometimes it's table stakes to move super fast and break stuff.

48:06Tomer Stavitsky:The large companies can maybe afford to make these mistakes like meta, Google, OpenAI, when they go out and acquire this business within a couple of weeks, because it's stable stakes. You have to become more competitive than the other one. But to small companies, it could make or break your business, especially if the acquisition is significant. Yeah, those are really good points on like poking holes. And also, I guess the key thing that you mentioned is identifying the strengths, because you kind of gave examples. Okay, here's the product. In this case, maybe the product's okay. are we betting on go-to-market, figuring out where's going to be the muscle ad, putting this business together, and then poke holes at it so you know where things are going to potentially be the risk or fall apart.

48:46Tomer Stavitsky:Yeah. And I also add execution. A big execution risk is when you're not being, I'll say, realistic about this business has some things we need to fix. Maybe the go-to-market is broken. Maybe the software architecture, if it's a software solution, maybe it's just not good. It needs to be upgraded and modernized. So if you're not being forthcoming about this to yourself and your company, then you're just going to find yourself in a situation where you're constantly doing like a fire drill and you're just getting surprised and you're not meeting milestones. So that particular chunk of activity is also super important when you go into the deal.

49:21Yeah, a lot of these fundamentals of doing the deal itself passes over with the same approach. I got to ask you one more thing. Tomer, what's the craziest thing you've seen in M &A?

49:29Tomer Stavitsky:Kind of connects to what I just said about AI. I'm seeing actually more and more companies these days that just run into deal processes and they feel the pressure from either the bankers that, you know, I'll try and sell the company or the company itself that wants to get sold. And they just, again, decide to forego certain diligence areas saying, yeah, it would be okay. We think that's a great team. But then, you know, they close the deal and they suddenly find all these surprises. These are exactly the things that cause the impairments. You know, I've seen some things I'm like very surprised about, like the strength of the customers.

50:03Tomer Stavitsky:For example, I've seen situations where somebody paid a very significant chunk of money to buy a company in the medical space. And then suddenly they realized that there's no good IP protection. That's a big surprise because IP is a big thing in the medical space. I saw some other situations where somebody bought a company and then a big customer ended up leaving shortly after the acquisition. So these are things that have been missed in diligence. It's hard for me to wrap my head around without knowing the exact details, but there's been some cases like this where the acquirer just loses immediately so much of the value and they might end up actually writing the whole thing off.

50:43It is wild. You're seeing all these like crazy acqui-hire valuations. It's going to be interesting. We've yet to see the craziness with AI deals. Hey, Tomer. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. This was a great conversation. I enjoyed it. I learned a lot about taking a partner first approach. You've helped me become a better enemy scientist.

51:01Tomer Stavitsky:Of course. Happy to be here. Thank you for the opportunity. Hey, those that tuned in, I appreciate your participation. It's a lot to get through this whole interview. Feel free to reach out to me. I love hearing feedback on these interviews. You got some tips how I can do my job better, make the content more interesting, valuable. If there's topics I haven't touched on that you'd like to see, let me know. Reach out. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I got my privacy guard down, so it's easier to connect with me. But put a little note so I know you're an actual podcast listener because I get tons of spam every day on there.

51:29Until next time, here's to the deal.

51:43Thank 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.

52:28Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.

52:42Views 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 not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.