The Next Chapter After 400 Episodes

0:00All right, special edition today. No guest, no interview, no deep dive into a deal. Just me talking directly to you because we're making a few changes. And I want you to hear it from me, not from a random post or buried in the show notes. We just hit 400 episodes, nearly 100 founding members for the new M &A Science membership. And I realized I've never actually told you the full story of what we're building here and why it matters. So if you're new, this probably isn't the best episode to start with. Go check out any other one. But if you've been following M &A Science for a while, if you've been part of this journey, I want to give you a real update, not some polished PR announcement, just where we've been, what we're building, and where this is going.

0:50Starting now, we're moving from Mondays to Thursdays. I know some of you have a morning routine. You commute, coffee, let me get my brain right for the week. I get it. But Mondays are chaos. People are in internal meetings all day, putting out fires. Deal teams are sprinting. Calendars are broken by 10 a.m. Thursdays are different. That's when you're in execution mode. That's when you're prepping for Friday meetings. That's when you actually have enough headspace to finish an episode and apply something. So new episodes drop on Thursdays. What's not changing, you're still getting an episode every week, Same practitioner-first conversations, same framework, same war stories, same actionable advice.

1:34Just a better release date that fits how people actually listen. All right, schedule change covered. Now the bigger update. Some of you have followed this whole journey. So let me give you the quick update on Dealroom. Dealroom is in a great place. Market leader for buy-side deal management, well over 200 corporate development teams using it, thousands of deals running through the platform. We brought in an incredible management team, product lead from HubSpot, and they're accelerating growth in a really professional way. But here's the honest part. That phase of a business, the scaling, the optimization, the process maturity, that's not my sweet spot.

2:13I'm boots on the ground. I like small teams. I like building new things. I like getting my hands dirty. So I stepped back as CEO. I'm still chairman, but my energy, my focus, my time, that's all going to M &A Science now. And I'm fired up about it. Here's why. I've been having a lot of conversations with our early members lately. And there's a pattern I keep seeing that I want to talk about. Because I think it says everything about what we're building here. A lot of our members did not come from the traditional path. They didn't go to an Ivy League school. They didn't start at Goldman or McKinsey.

2:49Nobody handed them a playbook on day one. They backdoored their way into M &A. They figured it out. They hustled. I was talking to a member recently, started in operations, never touched a deal until a few years ago. He told me he used to listen to episodes in his car on the way to work and then go apply what he learned that same week. Fast forward, he just led a major acquisition, sourcing, diligence, integration, the whole thing. And he told me flat out, I learned how to do this from the podcast. It's not an isolated story. I hear versions of this all the time. These are the underdogs. They're out there competing and winning against people who had every advantage handed to them.

3:31That fires me up more than anything. Because here's the truth about M &A. The industry has always had a gatekeeping problem. The best knowledge lives behind expensive exec ed programs, closed-door conferences, and networks you can only access if you went to the right school or worked at the right bank. If you didn't have that pedigree, you were on your own. We're changing that. What we're building at M &A Science is an equalizer. We're democratizing access to the best M &A knowledge in the world. You don't need to spend$50 ,000 on every league executive education program. You don't need to know the right people.

4:09You just need to be willing to put in the work. And that's who our community is. Practitioners who are passionate about the craft, people who care about getting better, not just getting the title. If that's you, you're in the right place. So what exactly are we building towards? The sell side of M &A is highly standardized. Investment bankers use the same playbook to sell a business. It's been that way for the decades. The buy side, it's a mess. It's ambiguous. Every company does it differently. No standard framework. Companies try to adopt software, but they don't even have the best practices in place to make that software useful.

4:48It's like buying a Ferrari when you don't even know how to drive. When we separated M &A Science into its own company, we set one goal. Build the standard for buy-side M &A. Nobody else is doing this. Not at this level. Not with this depth of practitioner experience behind it. And not with the mission of making it accessible to everyone. After sitting down with over 400 operators, one thing stands out above everything else. The best acquirers listen. They don't show up with a pitch deck and a timeline. They show up curious. They ask better questions. They understand the seller's world before they try to insert themselves into it.

5:28That's the foundation of buyer-led M &A. And that skill doesn't require a fancy degree. It requires discipline, curiosity, and a willingness to learn from people who've been there. everything we're building comes back to that. Now, here's what kept coming up in conversations with listeners and members. People would tell me, I love the podcast. I've learned a ton, but I need help applying this to my deal. And that makes total sense. You're not doing generic M &A. You're in week two of diligence on a healthcare carve-out, or you're trying to figure out how to structure an earn-out for a SaaS acquisition with 10 million in ARR, or your CFO just walked in your office and asked you what quality of earnings red flags to look for in a fintech target.

6:13And you need an answer now, not next Thursday when the next episode drops. The podcast gives you frameworks and best practices, but translating that into your specific situation, your specific deal, your specific industry, that takes time you don't have. So we built something. We introduced a membership model, and I want to be clear about the pricing because it's intentional. It's$1 ,000 a year. Think about that for a second. A single conference can run you$3 ,000 to$5 ,000 by the time you add flights, hotels, and two days out of the office. An exec ed program at a top school,$30 ,000 to$50 ,000.

6:54And what do you get? A few days of panels and a certificate on your wall. For$1 ,000 a year, you get access to what we call the Intelligence Hub. And this is the difference between consuming content and having a tool that actually helps you do the work. We've taken everything, all 400-plus podcast conversations, all the courses from our previous academy, all the templates and frameworks we've collected over the years, and we made it dynamic with AI. Here's the difference between this and ChatGPT. ChatGPT gives you general answers, fine for a lot of things. But when you're in the middle of a deal and you ask how to handle a specific integration challenge or a tricky TSA negotiation, it's guessing.

7:40It's pulling from the internet. It doesn't know what actually works. Our intelligence hub pulls from answers from actual practitioner experience. The most comprehensive set of experiential intelligence in the M &A industry. You get a detailed answer. You can see exactly where it's sourced from. You can listen to the original conversation. And if you want to go deeper, the AI will build you a custom learning track, pulling from content from multiple sources into a personalized course. Let me make this real. Say you're a corp dev professional at a PE-backed tech company, and you need to know how other teams have handled day one readiness for a cross-border acquisition.

8:21You could spend three hours digging through old episodes. You could Google it and hope you find something relevant. Or you could ask the Intelligence Hub and get a specific source guidance in seconds from people who've actually done it. That's not consuming content. that's having a tool that works as hard as you do. I've been talking to members who are using this on live deals right now. They love it. This is the kind of resource that used to only exist if you had the right network. Now it's available to anyone willing to invest in themselves. We're at just under 100 members right now, and this is just the beginning.

8:59Let me tell you what's on the roadmap. First, FireLed M &A Certification. A real certification built on how deals actually work, sourced from hundreds of operator conversations, not theoretical exam you memorize for, not gated behind a$40 ,000 program. If you want to formalize your buy-side expertise, this is it. Second, an enterprise version of the intelligence hub. Imagine uploading your company's onboarding materials, your deal postmortems, your internal playbooks, and turning all that into a live searchable center of excellence. New team member joins. They get immediate AI-powered answers on how your company runs deals, not a static SharePoint folder, a living system.

9:46We got two PhD learning development professionals on staff building this out. This isn't a side project. This is the core of what we're investing in. All right, here's the part where I ask you to do something. There are two ways to get involved. One, become a member, an official M &A scientist. If you've gotten value from this podcast, if you've used what you learned here to get better at your job, make it official. A thousand bucks a year. I'm in there. I'm answering questions. I'm building this thing in real time with the members. This is a community of practitioners who are passionate about the craft.

10:25not a networking group for people to hand out business cards, a real community of people who want to get better and help each other get better. Go to mascience.com, sign up, become an M &A scientist. Two, become a deal leader. This one's different and I want to explain why it matters. We're building the standard for buy-side M &A. That's not something one person does. That's not something a small team does. that takes a community of experienced practitioners who are willing to contribute to the framework, write artifacts, teach classes, mentor the next generation. That's what deal leaders do. If you think about it, how many people get a chance to help define how an entire industry operates?

11:10That's a legacy contribution. Your fingerprints on the playbook that thousands of practitioners will use. But I'm going to be straight with you. This isn't a title you collect. It's work, real work. If you've done at least 20 deals, real deals, not watching from the sidelines, and you're willing to actually show up and contribute, reach out. We want you. If you just want the credential without the commitment, this isn't for you. To learn more, get in touch with me directly, kison, K-I-S-O-N, at mascience.com. Let me leave you with this. I think about the members I've been talking to. The ones who listened to this podcast in their car because they didn't have any other way to learn how M &A actually works.

11:56The ones who didn't have the pedigree, didn't have the network, didn't have the expensive education, but they had the drive. And they used what they learned here to earn their seat at the table. That's who we're building this for. That's always been who we're building this for. This is the next chapter of M &A Science. We've gone from a podcast I didn't even want to start to building what I believe is going to be the definitive platform for BuySide M &A. Accessible, practitioner-driven, built on real experience, not theory, not hype, not gatekeeping. If you've been on this journey, thank you. You're the reason this exists.

12:38And if you're ready to go deeper, come build this with us. Go to mascience.com. See you Thursday.

12:59Thank 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.

13:43Again, that's mascience.com. Here's to the deal.