Episode 18: Special—An Acquirer’s View into M&A with Taylor Barada, head of Corp Dev at Adobe
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Welcome to episode 18 of Acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert. I'm David Rosenthal. And we are your hosts. Today, we have a very special episode that kind of breaks the mold of the show. Uh,

We had an opportunity that we absolutely couldn't pass up. And even though we're not covering a single specific deal, we think this is going to be a super, super interesting episode for listeners out there. So David, you want to tell them about our guests? Yeah, we are lucky to be joined by a special guest today, Taylor Barada, who is the VP and head of CorpDev, CorpStrategy, and Strategic Partnerships at Adobe. So welcome, Taylor. Thanks for joining us.

Yeah, excited to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. Of course, quick background on Taylor. He joined Adobe in 2013. Before that, he was the VP of Business at Zynga. And before that, he was also relevant to our show, head of corp dev at Yahoo. He has a JD MBA from Northwestern. And after Northwestern, spent a couple years at Bain before getting into the deal-making world. And...

Perhaps most interestingly, you are the first guest on our show who is a former professional athlete. Taylor played professional soccer or probably more accurately football in England. Maybe we'll get into that. Lots of deal making in that world. Yeah, exactly. No, I would say that looking back on it, I didn't have the language at the time, but the

There was no real U.S. scene when I came out of college, and so effectively I became an independent solo soccer entrepreneur. I had to go kind of figure out how to insert myself into the European game. It was an amazing life experience, but not always the easiest.

Yeah, man, that could be like a whole separate episode. Probably not of this podcast, but I'm sure it's a cool story. So what we thought we'd do for this episode is kind of stick to our typical structure. But instead, as Ben mentioned, of talking about why...

One acquisition in particular, we just thought we'd use it as a vehicle to tailor get your insights kind of from the inside of being in corp dev and how you think about deals and acquisitions as you're as you're going through them.

So we have a bunch of questions, but I thought we'd start with sort of the acquisition history and facts section as usual. And I think the best way to kick off would be something that probably most of our listeners are curious about and I'm curious about. How do conversations typically start between corp dev and startups? Either when you're approaching startups or when they're approaching you, what's the beginning of the story usually look like?

Yeah, it's funny. I mean, I think the, you guys even doing this, this podcast and this focus is, um, I think filling a nice, uh, gap and need, cause it's not something I spent a ton of time thinking about because at some point it's just sort of natural and it seems very fluid and relationship driven and, and not some big moment of, uh, you know, Hey, we're for sale. Although, you know, those things do happen, but, um,

Yeah. And I think it can be very sort of mystical and seem like this dark black art that, you know, and I find sometimes that entrepreneurs, when it feels that way, they tend to pull back and be very reserved because they're not sure what they can and can't say. And they don't want to say the wrong thing and all of which is totally fair. And so, um, on our end, what I've always done individually when I've been a deal lead and then what the culture I try to create on our group is that you remember that, um,

The process is fluid and it's hard to know which ones are going to actually go the distance and lead to a deal and which ones aren't. The Valley, as we all talk about in sort of the broader technology industry outside of the Valley, is incredibly small. And so because of that, it's very relationship oriented. And because of that, the way these conversations often start is just literally a connection and intro like, hey,

you guys are in this space, this company is doing interesting things, you know, you guys should just get to know each other. I've always liked, after stumbling across it at some point in the last couple of years, Mark Suster's blog post on investing in lines, not dots. And, you know, I think his concept is,

is that it's very hard to make a decision when you only have one point in time. But when you've had connections over time and you have the benefit of sort of seeing people say what they're going to go do and then hopefully go do it or something better, it develops credibility and you have time to sort of process and have a perspective on how it fits in. And so oftentimes it's as simple as that. We get introduced. We sort of say, hey, you should talk to someone.

And there absolutely is the other sort of 20% case where some company has been going off in a space that we haven't been tracking or a company that we haven't necessarily focused on that decide they either get the stereotypical inbound strategic interest from someone else in the space and they decide that they want to talk to others and see what's

If they want to sell or they want to sell to us or frankly sell to the highest bidder, that type of thing. And we'll get those calls. We'll take those calls and we will sometimes do those. But that's a high bar and we try hard to develop relationships so that sort of 80% of it is more strategy driven, more relationship driven and there's broader perspective and a broader context that's developed over a long period of time.

Yeah. And in that original kind of introduction, when someone says, hey, you know, this company is a newer company, they're playing around in sort of a similar space or similar customers segment to you guys. What's the context for starting that relationship? Is it is it a partnership or is it just like, you know, let's not play any games. We sort of know that there might be some acquisition at some point in the future or, you know, what's the incentive for that entrepreneur to kind of start that conversation?

Yeah. Look, you can waste an enormous amount of time if you just, you know, run around the Valley talking to all the big companies, right? That's not your job. Your job is to build value for customers. And at some point you're going to be able to monetize that value either through an IPO or the sale of the company. And, um,

With that as context, I think sometimes you get into a scenario of like, well, and I've had introductions where a VC was an investor in a company, tried to make an introduction for us. And the entrepreneur told the VC who was on his board, like, why would I even take that meeting? I'm not trying to sell the company. You know that. And I've always found that kind of humorous because the whole point is, you know, it's like the old saying of, you know,

When you want money, ask for advice. When you want advice, ask for money and that whole thing. If you're calling us asking to be sold, it certainly can happen. But if your first interaction is that, it puts an awful lot of weight on that interaction and doesn't need to be that way. I think it also ignores the point which I always make when we talk about it over time as things develop is that

If you're smart as a seller, you should, you're going to have a fiduciary duty to get the highest value you can for the business when it comes that time. So that's just, that's just is. But at some point, once the deal takes place, you and the team will be working there. And so is it a place where you think your vision cannot just sort of go and get parked, but hopefully can be accelerated and it's not an end as much as it is a beginning?

And is it, are you, are they the type of people that you want to work with? Do they see the world the same way? And, um, those things, sometimes you think like, Oh, that doesn't matter. We're just going to sell the highest bidder. It's like, well, yes, of course we get that. Everyone gets that. But, um, you,

it doesn't mean that you should ignore all other stakeholders, all other factors. And, um, the way you've sort of sussed those out and frankly, due diligence on us and other, other places and try to see whether it feels right is by getting to know people over time. So I actually think it's best when it's explicitly not around a specific, um, conversation. Um,

It's certainly fine if there is a specific partnership that seems very interesting with the big company, but those also can be

colossal waste of time. Every small company thinks that every big company is the keys to the kingdom and a partnership with them will unlock everything. But oftentimes they take a very long time to get done. Once they're done, they take a very long time to mature. And the ones that are truly game changing for startups are few and far between. And so it doesn't mean you shouldn't do them. It just means you have to be pragmatic about what you should expect for them. And so if there is a partnership you want,

We oftentimes act as sort of a concierge into this wildly complex 15,000 person company, which we sort of know how to navigate. And from the outside, it's probably extremely hard to figure out who to get to if you want to talk about a partnership around one particular product line.

So we can definitely do that. But like I said, I think it's best oftentimes if it's much more open ended and it's just, hey, we're in the space, would love to meet, you know, this VC that we're, we both know, thought we should, we should get to know each other and, you know, not looking for funding, not looking to sell, but, you know, would love to love to grab coffee and just talk about what we're doing.

It's amazing, you know, as we're talking about this and even as we were preparing for the episode, like how much this mirrors the process of raising venture capital too, which

To be honest, I mean, it's an education for me. I never really thought about that. But we coach our companies when they're thinking about raising around, you know, all the time. You know, you're always raising. You're not always closing, but you're always raising because of this very, you know, it takes time to build relationships. And VC investors, as you point out, you know, the Schuster blog post is great about wanting to invest in

needing to invest in lines, not dots. And occasionally there'll be a dot that, you know, is so compelling you have to invest in, or it would seem for you guys, you have to buy, but, um, it takes time to build these relationships. What, uh, what do you think, you know, as, as you're doing that, uh, maybe talk a little bit about kind of the importance of culture and that relationship and the people fit. Um, I know it's something that's really important to you in Adobe, um,

How are you assessing that when you're talking to entrepreneurs? I'd say Adobe, it's uniquely important to us. And we've walked away from extremely large deals north of a billion dollars because we didn't feel like the culture fit was there. And part of it just has to do with how we think about

what we're doing and what we think has made us an enduring business over 30 years in a really dynamic space. And, um, you know, the company has morphed from, you know, postscript and printing tools and things like that, you know, into desktop publishing and then creative tools and now into marketing. And, um, and now it was an acquisition a long time ago. Yes. Yeah. That

Again, that's somewhat unique. My understanding was it was a couple guys and a product, but yes, the nascent piece was there and then they built around it. How does that... You talk about the qualities that you look for when you're acquiring someone to be a culture fit. How does that impact...

the outcome of the acquisition? And is there like anything in specific specifically that you sort of look for as, okay, this is going to be, you know, this is going to make this outcome financially successful for Adobe because this person has X mindset. Yeah. Um, I think it's definitely related. I mean, I always say, you know, we don't care about winning the press release.

You know, you create value. And one of the reasons why valuing companies is art, not science in a strategic acquirer scenario, you know, versus a private equity or whatnot, is that like, look, it's, and even in private equity, this is really true if you get down to it, is that, you know, your valuation comes become because of a present value of your future cash flows. Like what drives those future cash flows is what you actually go do in the market together. Yeah.

And inevitably, we're not like a holding company that's just going to buy great properties and let them roll. We're trying to have a point of view around the market and say, hey, look, we can come together and maybe it's not one and one equals three, but there's some sort of element of...

that overused word of synergy. And we're looking for leverage and looking for a perspective that we can accelerate the vision of the entrepreneur, but also frankly accelerate our own vision and hopefully even broaden it at times, just as we did when we went from creative to marketing with the amateur acquisition.

Excuse me. And, um, so it's the reason it's so important is that if you have an incredible strategy and incredible vision, we all know it's meaningless. It's about execution. Like big companies are no different than startups in that effect. Execution creates value. Strategy is what allows you to have the opportunity to, um, get into that mode. Um, but you gotta go do it. And I think the one last thing, and, um,

you know, we've touched on this a little bit when we were catching up before the call is that the, to me, if I had to pick one hallmark that gives me a, a sort of good positive early indicator that we're on the right track is when I start to see through the back and forth and comparing notes on the strategy and the vision that this concept of accelerating the entrepreneur's vision around where they're going is there, but it's not, that's not the only thing. The other thing is they actually start to

embrace the broader vision that we have and say, you know what,

actually think I can expand your vision and I want to get in and I if I could if I could work with you guys on that I can do something bigger and so oftentimes you'll see over time that the deals that work really well and where where it particularly works well for the founders or you know CEOs is where they end up loving the concept of getting inside a bigger company and maybe they're really dyed-in-the-wool product people and all this raising money and all this other stuff is you

you know, part of what they have to do, but it's not what they love. And all of a sudden they're unleashed and they get to just go do what they, they want and spend all of their energy there. And so whether it's here or, you know, two of the smaller deals I did while I was at Yahoo, um, uh, one was for a company called citizen sports founder named Mike Kearns. I'm founding that company with another guy named Jeff Ma, who's well-known from the

bringing down the house days, um, and, and all that from MIT. But, um, uh, so Mike came in and just did phenomenally well. And then another was, um, a company called into now, um, that was, uh, founded and spun out by, uh, a guy named, um, Adam Cahan. And those two guys stuck around Yahoo for, uh,

Mike just left about a year ago and I think Adam's still at Yahoo and they rose to be two of Marissa's SVPs of product. These were smaller acquisitions so it's not like they came in the door doing that. They had a real passion for online media and where it could go and not just what they were doing with their product but what you could do if you applied some of the principles of social and mobile to the broader Yahoo business.

And we've seen the same thing here at Adobe. And I think it's, you know, I think it's a classic sign that things will work out quite well.

It's really cool to hear you talk about that. In one of our early episodes, we had Kurt DelBene from Microsoft on and we talked about the Accompli acquisition. And he talked about this very fact that one of the things that Microsoft is thinking about now in terms of M&A is just what you're talking about, about the people and the culture fit since Kurt's now leading the LinkedIn acquisition, which is much bigger and more complex. But

But for Javier at Soltero at Accompli, you know, he's now running all of Outlook and exactly mirrored these themes. Let's...

move on. We, so we sort of break acquisition history and facts into two parts, you know, and my favorite part is sort of the stories of the acquisition sort of what we've been talking about here. But I bet a lot of our listeners will be really curious about like, what's the process? You know, once you've realized that, you know, there's a relationship here that,

could bear fruit. What are the steps in the process when you're actually working through a deal at that point, from LOI to term sheet to the definitive agreements? What are the key milestones for you guys? And what specifically are you looking for? Is it cool? Financial? Check. Cool. There's no lawsuits against them. Check. Cool. Your product is growing with users. Check. Those sorts of things. Yeah. Look, ultimately, you're going to do a deal if it makes...

you know, strategic sense, the technology product fit is there and the financials you think make sense for your shareholders, right? And for us, the fourth one that I would put that over, you know, cuts across all of that is just the people as we've already talked about. So,

Um, the hard part about the deal is these are all, even though we have a quote unquote process and every, um, large acquirer, um, that is, is sort of a repeat player, right? And so all the places that I've been and done this role, um,

are definitely in that. And, you know, the other ones are people like you've mentioned, so Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, et cetera. Um, repeat players absolutely have a process and there's different flavors and each company has, has different places where different types of decisions, uh, either take place or which parts of the org are responsible for them. So there's, there's definitely a number of different ways to do it. Um, but it's, um,

Every deal is its own sort of perfect snowflake. They're all snowflakes. So they're deals and there's unbelievable correlations from them. And when you get into the grain or everyone has decided we're going to make this happen,

it becomes kind of a machine and the legal side and the diligence side starts to take on a life of its own. And that really does happen. So I would say in general, this is tough because on the outside, when you, particularly if you're not going through a hardcore sort of auction process and have hired a bank or whatever, but it's a, it's a place where you sort of think, well, look, we're not really for sale, but they seem to be interested. So I'm open to doing this, but I don't want to sort of waste all my time.

bandwidth and emotional energy and sort of exploring this, how would we do it?

So typically there's usually an early meeting with someone in the business unit that's responsible for the product area where there is the strategic interest and the overlap and trying to get an understanding for the product vision, the product technology, maybe a bit of a demo, a little early point of view on numbers. And I think sometimes it can be tough to decide when do you share what. And I think we're always fine if an entrepreneur –

It feels like they want to get an NDA in place before they share some financials and things like that. We tend to try to make sure that we kind of have checkpoints. If we get someone who's trying to sort of take a read on the market because they're about to do a fundraising round and they just figure they better think about it and they want to talk to a handful of people that are sort of the logical people,

fits for that business and say they decide we're one of them and then sort of check in with us. We will oftentimes do at least one call without an NDA where we just sort of say, tell us the story and we'll go through that. So there's sort of a high level business product check early on and then at some point you start to kind of have a feel for the financial side as well as you go through that.

The biggest milestone you'll find with large acquirers is kind of the LOI or the term sheet. And that almost always – and I truly mean almost always –

That includes a no-shop provision of some period of time, typically 45 to 60 days, sometimes 30 days. Those are the types of things where once you get to that stage, you'll have a lawyer involved and they can advise you what is quote-unquote market. Just like a venture financing. It's funny how there are parallels. Yes. You're going to have your lawyer and they're going to be able to tell you what's market. They'll educate you on what the business ramifications are of

of what is being done. Every big company has slightly nuanced ways of doing things and because we are repeat players and the lawyers are repeat players, there's certain things where

You know, it's basically like, yeah, we're not, you know, we're not going to do that because of the precedent of it and that type of thing. So oftentimes those are, but they, you know, depending on, you know, where the leverage lies, depends on how much those things get negotiated by the buyer or the seller. Again, exactly like a venture round in that respect. And then once you get through that, that's when you see the circle of knowledge, you

on both sides expand, but particularly on the buy side, sometimes it can be overwhelming because then we're going to jump in and do a day minimum, oftentimes two or three days of kind of a deep dive, take us through the business beginning to end in terms of go through the product, go through the go-to-market, go through the financials, go through the operations, go through the technology architecture, etc.,

And then, you know, that's when you build out a very detailed data room. And, you know, I think with the super early stage companies, sometimes you'll run into some issues where, you know, they didn't have their house in order. They didn't get good legal advice early enough on. And, you know, maybe they...

Working with a couple of outside agencies and they didn't have them sign an invention assignment agreement, that type of stuff. Those are, at this point, I saw that more 10 years ago than I do today. I think the breadth of startup legal advice and sort of smart, experienced angels as well, certainly in the venture community as well.

you just people tend to have a pretty buttoned up shop particularly if they're venture-backed and and things are pretty clean but if you're outside of the valley and maybe the company was lucky enough to grow you know bootstrapped or whatever and they kind of just made all work every on then you'll run across

things where they didn't have their house in order. And then it's rarely a deal killer, but it usually ends up being something you got to sort of work around. So you drive through that. At some point, you put in place a definitive agreement where our lawyers will put together a

an acquisition agreement, depending on if it's a share purchase or an asset purchase, etc. And you kind of go back and forth on that and try to get it finalized. And ultimately, deals are announced once the definitive agreement has been signed. And then there's a question of is it a

simultaneous sign and announce and close meaning you know we signed it we sent the money we own it or is there a split sign and close where you know we sign it we announce it and then there's 30 days to meet XYZ closing conditions before you know we would actually close you'll see both

Yeah. And you mentioned throughout all these steps, there was one point in there where the business owner talks with the company they're acquiring and compares vision and strategy and digs in with CorpDev. How involved is the business owner throughout that entire process? Are they in every single meeting? Are they in that first meeting? Is it the business owner that first contacts that company? What is their role and what is the role of CorpDev throughout the entire acquisition process?

Yeah, it's critical. So I mean, one thing to know is you can't ignore corp dev. In many ways, they're going to be your guide and your partner throughout this. And I truly view it as a much more collaborative thing. If you're going to get a deal done eventually, it's going to be because everyone thinks it makes sense. And you're able to

you know, get together at a, at a, at a valuation that everyone feels good about. Right. So I very much try to make it clear to people, you know, and make sure that our deal leads make it clear that no one can quote unquote make you do anything you don't want to do. So that is one thing I think out of the gates to kind of demystify the whole process and, and take a little pressure off.

the relationship with the business owner is critically important. I mean, in the language I use, and again, every company has sort of slightly different ways of thinking about this, but I think of it as there's an executive sponsor and there's a business owner. Oftentimes you will see, particularly if a company's kind of

got some VC intros and things like that, they will be really focused on like trying to get in to meet the CEO or get to meet the, you know, the head of the whole business unit. And I've never been guilty of that. Yeah. And like, and it's fine. Like everyone gets it, you know, it's the old thing of coming high and work down and blah, blah. And it's, it's on, sometimes it can be fine. Um,

Other times it can be either off-putting or even, you know, sort of counterproductive in that if you get in front of them too early before the business owner and corp dev have been able to kind of frame it and suss out in combination with you sort of your business well enough that then we can effectively translate and help people understand why this is exciting, why this matters. They might take one meeting and be like, eh.

I wasn't that interested. And then it creates this uphill battle where corp dev and the business owner are like, no, no, no, no, no, no. We got to spend a little more time on this. This one's interesting, right? And so trusting – I've seen this play out. It's so true. So even if you've got like this perfect, hey, my venture guy says he is like golfing buddies and best friends with the CEO or whatever, right?

It's just a card you – I generally just sort of say play it straight up, play it open, and then treat the corp dev person and the business owner as people that are your partners to figure out whether this makes sense. Not –

you know, not someone who you got to kind of like micromanage the thing. Cause ultimately it's, it's not like a enterprise software sort of SAS. You're going into an it group. They've got a need for a widget. You've got a widget. You're going to sell them on wise years is the best. And then, you know, wham, we're done. Like get it done. Right. It just, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a very subtle, uh,

collaborative dance where both sides are evaluating each other and getting to know each other. And you can't, I mean, it's sort of overblown to say it's a marriage, but look, you're selling your baby that you put heart and soul into creating. You want to find out if we're good stewards of it, if our visions align and you should care about this. It's so funny going back to the parallels with venture. I mean, it just keeps coming up, but like,

we see companies make this mistake with us all the time is, you know, they come in, they meet with one partner and, you know, that relationship is progressing at a natural pace. And then, you know, in the worst case, the founder CEO or, but oftentimes one of the other venture backers or somebody will come in and talk to another partner. And it's called, we call it partner shopping and like nothing will kill a deal faster than that. Yeah.

Yeah, and there's less issue with that here because we're not a partnership. There's a natural organizational structure to a big company. But you're still going to somebody you think has influence but actually has no context on the relationship. And back to that being the most important thing, you can totally see how that can blow up deals. Yeah, exactly. It really blows up deals. And that's the other thing why I say there's almost no misstep.

that you can't get over if actually it makes business sense. And that's the other reason why I say getting people in the mind space of like, you're building a great business. Like you're going to get the exit you deserve. And we're looking for a collaborative collaboration to figure out whether we're the right home for it. Right. It's like, it takes all the pressure off because the real answer is you don't need to micromanage and overmanage it. Like we do this off all the time. And if we're approaching it with that mindset, like we're going to together to figure it out. Right.

Because the biggest reason people do that is because they're in like value optimization mode in the back of their mind. They think I got to maximize value. And it's like, yeah, totally. That's it is literally in the bylaws. It's your fiduciary responsibility. Right. And we get it. You get. And so it's part of that. But if you, if you overmanage that and overplay it at the wrong, wrong times, um,

It just, it comes across awkward. And again, if it actually makes sense, you're probably going to recover from it. So even if you do, it's not that big a deal. Like I said, I like, I've never not done a deal, but I've had deals where it was much harder to get there because, you know, we, someone figured out some way to get in front of either the CEO or some, you know, some other head of a business unit or something earlier than we probably would have ideally wanted. Or sometimes it comes in that way and that's fine too. But then it's like, you know, people got to do your job where it's,

To bring that whole thread back around to the core question that you asked, I think it was Ben, the business owner or that sort of head of product is actually an extremely important relationship as well. You should have a sense of if you were king for a day and ran that business, where would you think that the startup that you run fits in?

And then how do you figure out who's responsible for that part of the business? And that's absolutely just as important a relationship. I would never say, you know, only focus on that relationship and ignore corp dev, but I would also never say focus on corp dev and don't worry about that relationship. You kind of have to have both. And sometimes, um,

Again, this probably also is like the venture. It's very organic and wherever you have an in, a warm intro, take the warm intro and then ask the questions of, hey, should I talk to someone in Corp Dev or whatever? I have business unit partners who...

who are very sophisticated, have sponsored deals many times. And they, part of the job of running a good, you know, being a good product manager, let alone a kind of business unit, you know, product owner or GM is understanding the outside market and knowing the ecosystem that you're in. So they should be out there meeting startups and stuff. So oftentimes they will meet someone and they'll hand it off and say,

you know what, I've met with this guy once or twice for coffee. I kind of like where he's headed. You should like nothing to do here. I'm not looking to do it. He's not looking to sell, but I just kind of want to get him on Corp Deseret or can you meet with them? That type of thing. Other times we're, you know, we've partnered with the business unit to develop a strategy and,

and, um, over overall, and we kind of know the spaces that we're sort of particularly interested in, we'll find, find a relationship or a company and we'll get intros and we'll pass them through. Um, I think that is one difference between the VC and MNA world is that sourcing is not some big, mad, magical thing. Um, you know, you know, we, every now and then we'll find something that we didn't expect because we've made an extra effort to, you know, get out and beat the bushes. But, um,

We're out there in the market. There's only so many acquirers. People will find us nine out of 10 times. If you're lucky as a VC firm, you also are in that position. Most of us aren't that lucky.

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The next category that we talk about on the show is acquisition category. And so every deal that we look at, we assign, we say, you know, was this a product acquisition or a business line acquisition or a people acquisition? We're curious on your end, like, do you guys do the same thing or is it more organic like as a...

you're looking at different companies and then they tend to fall. Like, like are you guys thinking like, yep, this is definitely an acqui hire or like, Oh, this could be like a huge business line acquisition or, you know, how's that going through your heads? Yeah. I mean, look, there's, there's industry stores, standard lingo, you know, acqui hires, tech and talent deals, you know, like, you know, whatever sort of business acquisitions or product acquisitions, those, those types of things are definitely, those are, I've heard those use, we've used those all the time. Um,

We don't get too hung up on it. One construct I've used inside of our business is from my Bain days, I had a respect for some of the profit from the core analysis and they'd done, there was actually a book written a number of years ago called Profit from the Core and they'd done analysis of like 2,000 companies and growth initiatives, both M&A and otherwise. And the concept was that once you understand what your core business is as a large scale company, understand

Understanding the business that drives the most profits and is sort of the most enduring from a perspective of who is the customer, what's the channel of the market, what's the geography you're playing in, what's the business model and what's the product.

Anytime you change one of those five things, you're like a one step adjacency further from the core and it creates risk. And actually they showed through analysis of all these different companies that, you know, once you got, I think it was one step adjacency was maybe about a 30 to 40% chance of success. But once you got out like three or four of those things changed, you dropped off to like 10% chance of success. It doesn't mean that you don't,

Take, you know, things that are multi-step adjacencies because sometimes those are where the biggest opportunities are, but you have to make sure that they're worth the risk. Otherwise, you're just leading to sort of undisciplined diversification and you have no better chances of success than just, you know, a private equity investor or a holding company and probably less because it's not really how your business has been set up to function.

focus, you know, the resources of the company on, right? So something like Omniture, we've gone back and looked at that, you know, in hindsight, and that was probably a four-step adjacency in many ways. It was, you know, SaaS, completely new product. It was an enterprise selling motion, which we didn't have in mature fashion at that point. And the business model in terms of, you know, recurring revenue was new because we hadn't moved to that with the creative side of the business. We'd

It was after that that we moved from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud. So that was, in hindsight, a very risky big bet. But it was a large big business that was the market leader, had real momentum. And so you could make that bet. And then if you focused on the rest of the things that you could control, it's ended up being a $2 billion plus. It's on the road to being more than that business for us. And so you...

it's not that you don't do those things, but you do them for the right reasons. And so as you think about that, you know,

Things that are in your core, meaning we're already in that part of the business, that's where we're more likely to look for some tech and talent, smaller kind of deals. Or we look for a little bit of a core expansion where it's kind of like a one-step adjacency where maybe we get a new product with a bit of a business around that's been proven in the market, but it's not scaled yet. We bring that in and we scale it. The marketing cloud, in many ways, after the Amateur acquisition, there were a number of other add-on acquisitions that were done to broaden out the product portfolio.

And then sell through the same channel. In the enterprise space in particular, you've seen that year after year. Once it's extraordinarily and perhaps...

not even appreciated how unbelievably hard it is to build a, you know, true, you know, large scale enterprise sales force. And the companies that have done that, that's such an unbelievably huge investment over, you know, like probably a decade to get there, that then it's a question of,

you know, how do you maximize the throughput of that channel every year? And so finding additional products to put in the salesperson's bag is a big part of it. So on the B2B sort of enterprise side, that's a big deal. You know, on the consumer side,

it's a slightly different element in terms of particularly all the networks and everything with the social networks and platforms we've seen have changed the dynamics there a bit. But historically, that was a little bit of Yahoo's original strategy was, okay, we have this portal. Let's just keep adding on things. That was before my time at Yahoo. But you see the approach driven by the business strategy. And I think that's at Adobe, that's in my personal sort of belief is that

It has to be a strategy-driven process. And so the categorization of what you're going after is driven by what you're trying to accomplish strategically.

Cool. Cool, cool. Moving on to our next segment, we always talk about what would have happened otherwise. And it's the part where we try and figure out if this deal didn't go through, whether other acquirers or would that company have grown on their own? And I feel like a good question to kind of dive into there is what percentage of deals that you look at actually end up happening? Yeah, it's very low. I mean...

Very low. And it's a question of what look at means, right? Yeah. You know, we've historically done sort of four to,

10 plus deals a year. I mean, I think actually the market strategy is our, our, our sort of strategic umbrella is big enough to do meaningfully more than that, but we've kind of intentionally focused on a strategy that says we, you know, we're going to make, we're going to make sure that the ones we do are going to work. And, and Adobe's, I mean, I have, we've had bankers come in and be like, what are you guys doing? How do you do it? And, and because everyone around the Valley is sort of saying that, you know, the ones you're doing seem to be working and,

I think a lot of it is just the willingness to say no. And that starts at the top. And we have a CEO, Shantanu Narayanan, who I describe as having founder-level passion. He's been here 19 years. He's been CEO nine. Wow.

you know, no different than a founder who, who just feels it in their bones and feels that level of passion for protecting the mission and the vision and, you know, that we're going after. And, um, what that means is it's a very high bar on what makes it through the Rubicon of strategy, fit tech, fit team, fit financial expectations, et cetera. And so you have to be willing to say no. And, and, um, in order to make sure that you, you know, you get the right ones, you have to

You have to be careful that that doesn't make you risk averse and not moving quick enough and fast enough. But, um,

I wouldn't even know how to put a percentage on it, but I would probably say sub 10%. A lot of things have to align to make a deal happen, both on both the seller and the buyer side. You know, so you're probably looking at plus or minus a thousand inbounds a year. I mean, we probably get two to five emails a day with, hey, would you be interested in checking this out? That sort of thing. And there are a lot of those, a lot of those. Yeah. I mean, a lot of those, the answer is, and it's probably, again, no different than VC. Yeah.

For us, it's just like, hey, that's not a fit, but appreciate you thinking of us. And we try hard to give quick answers and quick no's if we just don't think it's worth it. And we don't window shop. You know, if we take a meeting, it's because we think it could be interesting.

That's awesome. And that's a great lead in. The next segment that we usually do is tech themes where we look around and we try and figure out what technology themes or themes in the industry and the world does this represent to you. And I think a really good kind of twist on themes here is how have you tackled M&A differently at the different companies you've been at? And how have you guys...

you know, taking a different kind of strategic or organizational approach between each one? Yeah. Again, M&A is a tool. I mean, you know, I've always joked that if, if I ever do something noteworthy enough that requires a memoir at some point and this stuff makes it in, it would be like, it's not about the deal, right? It's, that would be, you know, there's the whole book with Lance Armstrong back in the day. It's not about the bike. It's like, it's not about the deal. I mean, the deal itself is mechanical. And if, if,

If you love that world, and there's people who do, and frankly, it's a fascinating, fun world on a lot of levels. If you love that world, I mean, those are the folks that end up in banking. And I have tons of respect for those guys because I think their jobs are really, really hard. And they only get paid if things get done. And then they oftentimes get a bad rap. And I think there's a lot of great ones out there. But it's just a tool. And so the question is, what is your strategy?

if you sort of tie that back to your core question of like, how are things a little bit different at different companies? I'd say at Yahoo, we were going in a lot of different directions when I got in there. We were,

It was 08, 09 when I joined. And, you know, there was a little, I found at times things were bubbling up, bottoms up in terms of people being entrepreneurial and trying to get things going at the business level, business unit level. And there wasn't, we were going through, it was kind of a restructuring. There wasn't as much of a clear, hey, we got to go do this tops down. And then you'd get the inevitable outcome.

"Hey, we got a call and supposedly Google's looking at buying this." And I was like, "So?" Doing what your competitors are doing is not a strategy. So we spent time around getting alignment around strategy. We spent time around locking in the concept from a process perspective of an executive sponsor so that you got the alignment early, tops down on strategy. And then it made sure that when we were spending time on things,

it tied to that. But frankly, Yahoo had a reputation, we worked hard on this, but it was just a little bit of reality at some point of the culture was we had a reputation for being a little bit slow. And so we tried hard to make sure that we were transparent with entrepreneurs around the different

hoops and stuff we were going to have to jump through together so that they could feel in control of it and we could feel like we were in it together instead of it just feeling like this monolithic bureaucratic thing. And it wasn't that, but it was just a nature of sort of how things got done and that culture and sort of where they were. And the culture of the company affects the process. At Zango, I mean, the company had been founded like three years before. I mean, Mark's an incredibly aggressive, dynamic entrepreneur. Yeah.

if he believed it made sense and we could convince him that we could go do it. So, I mean, I remember working on a deal and, you know, we found out that some entrepreneurs had spun off from one company that we thought was interesting and gone and done something else. And you could just tell from talking to the guy that had been left behind was that the real creative juice had walked out the door. And so it was basically like you got off the phone and it was like being in a movie. It was like, find those guys, you know? And so someone on the team got them.

Someone on the team got them on the phone. We literally, like two hours later, we had them on the phone and I was like, can you come to San Francisco tomorrow? And they were like,

Like, are you crazy? And I was like, great, we'll be there at one o'clock. And we like hopped on a plane and went down. And like, it was sort of like, it was this incredible, you know, it was fun because you felt like you were going to go make it happen immediately. It was that type of time in that company. And from a strategy perspective, we were trying, we had, we,

we had the sort of tiger by the tail in terms of, you know, what was happening with social and everything. We had, we knew the categories that we needed to add from a social gaming perspective. You needed to find the teams to go do them because we didn't have enough people in house to do it. It was that type of,

of voracious growth. And so it made strategic business sense to try to move that fast. Um, and part of it was just, again, the culture at the top. It's just, look, I guess my point is the culture of the company, the strategy of the company, where it is in the arc of its growth will define what process it creates and how it goes, it goes about it. And then also what it, um, what it sort of means. And, you know, at Adobe, um, we have these bigger arcs that we're working against and, um,

you know, the thing from a corporate strategy perspective, um,

What we've been focused on for several years are three big trends. One is, as I say, everyone in both the consumer and the enterprise side has been dealing with this unbelievable wave of mobile. How do you get it to the point where it's truly a tailwind? There's only a handful of companies that I think have really cracked the code. Facebook, the pivot they did. I was there at Zynga when they were trying to figure that out. Neither one of us

really had it working for us. They figured out how to make it work for them. And, you know, it really took their business to another height. And it's like every year when Mary Meeker, now at Kleiner Perkins, formerly Morgan Stanley, comes out with that internet report. And that there's that slide where she shows the percentage of,

time spent on the internet shifting to mobile. And every year it like outpaces the trend line from the year before. And it's like, how do you get it to the point where that's truly a tailwind so that that is just naturally making your business, you know, exceed expectations. So that was one. It's like make mobile a tailwind across our entire business. Um,

Second was, it's obvious when you look at the consumer internet that the last 10 years have been around unlocking network effects, right? Through social networks, marketplace business models, platform business models. There's...

interesting opportunity, I think, in the sort of SaaS-based enterprise to look at unlocking similar network effects. And the way you do that is by making data and content like really strategic assets. And historically, enterprise software has largely been, you know, we're tools. You know, we'll sell you a tool and you do whatever you want with that tool. Whereas consumer platforms look at data and content as the strategic assets that are

that are sort of theirs. And there's a hybrid approach that I think you're starting to see emerge in B2B businesses as well, where customers certainly have their own data, but they blend it with network level data from the technology providers as well. And so those are some big trends that we've been openly pursuing and really sort of came from outside in

of what was happening, not just in our own space, but actually was happening across the broader landscape, including the consumer world that I'd sort of seen at Yahoo and Zynga. Yeah, that's great. It's really cool. The kind of next section before, I guess our last section before we do carve-outs is...

the, the conclusion. And this is where we decide, you know, usually just David and I did this acquisition go well. Do we call it an a like Instagram or, you know, on down the line, hard to argue with that one. Yeah. Do you guys have any kind of internal process where you look back and, or even just isolated examples of like what you look for and, and success metrics of yes, that was a good acquisition and we should do more things like this.

So one of the things that our team's responsible for under me is the M&A integration function. And I've always felt like that's a critical to be combined in the same group because otherwise it breeds a behavior that sort of feels like, hey, we're just responsible for banging out the deal. It doesn't matter if you throw it over the wall and someone else will integrate it, that type of thing. I always...

I myself have thought of the job as a growth job. It just happens that a deal is part of it and you have to partner with the entrepreneur and partner with the business owner and sort of be CEO of that growth opportunity until you

someone else can truly take the mantle that will be responsible for running that business. And if you think about it that way, there's little things where you put a little extra amount of care and attention into things like retention packages. And even though the entrepreneur is telling you that this person's critical, you're actually sensing that maybe that's more for historical reasons and they don't understand that in the bigger company, once they're inside this person who has been their right-hand person from an operational perspective, there's like

Three other functions that are gonna serve that purpose for them and they're actually less important So you kind of underweight you sort of talk to them and collaborate to figure out how actually you want to maybe reward them more at the time of the deal But actually put a little more retention for someone else that's gonna their their importance is gonna go up post acquisition those types of interesting nuances if you're not focused on the integration when you're When you're doing the deal you just do things differently. I

And so that's important. And so by having the integration function in there, we make sure that they're in our weekly meetings and that we share learnings and it's sort of part of the culture. So to me, it starts with culture inside the group, which is, you know, it's a growth leader function, not kind of a deal function. So that's one. From a formal sort of postmortem evaluation process, we commit to reporting out to our

you know, our CEO and CFO as well as the board every year, every quarter. We do a report for two years after a deal that reports against basic, you know, key value drivers and metrics. You know, as you might imagine, there's a financial one, there's a product one, there's sort of employee retention depending on sort of how many people we're trying to retain, that type of stuff. And

excuse me, we try to make sure that, you know, we're being hard on ourselves and, you know, not just greens across the board, but we're being honest about, you know, where things are sort of yellow and red. And, um, every once in a while we'll do a more formal deep dive post-mortem if, if something hasn't gone well. Um,

These things are really hard. And as I alluded to earlier with the statistics from the profit from the core, I always joke that in general, this is not NBA free throw shooting. It's much more Hall of Fame shooting.

baseball hitting, you know, meaning for those that aren't sports fans, you know, it's not 70, 80, 90%. It's, it's probably plus or minus, uh, you know, 30% is, is not all bad. And, um, our track record at Adobe is actually, you know, dramatically higher than that. And every now and then it's like you make lemonades out of lemons where things didn't work out like you expected them to, but you had the right team and the culture fit and the product to build from. And you went in a slightly different direction and that's okay too. Right.

And that goes back to why culture fit is important. It says if things go wrong and the market plays out differently, you can still create value.

There are definitely companies that have meaningful hundreds of millions of dollar bets that are effectively swing and misses and complete write downs. And we haven't had that. I think a lot of it has to do with the culture of focusing on thinking about the long range before you even do the deal. So the postmortem and the valuation is important, but it's more the fact that you know you're going to be doing it and you know that that's what we all care about. And that's what sort of changes the upfront.

I love that as a, as a way to, to wrap it too, that, you know, um, culture is, uh, is, you know, what's going to drive, uh, you know, things are, it's interesting to, to think about back to this analogy with venture, like, um,

the happiest day of the next two years of your company is going to be when you close that round, like, and then the real hard work starts. And, you know, it's, it's the entrepreneurial drive that's going to keep founders engaged when, you know, life is, is quite challenging. And, and I'm sure that's the same, you know, after an acquisition inside the company and kind of gets back to, if it's not the right culture fit, you're not going to have that drive to keep going.

A hundred percent. And it can be sad too, because you see it where, I mean, entrepreneurs who sell something and it doesn't fit and it ends up withering on the vine or being killed or dies inside a big company.

you meet those guys later or women and it's like, they can't be more bitter. Something they, they poured their life into, they feel wasn't respected and honored and whatnot. And sometimes, you know, the market plays out differently and they, they get that and that's that. But if a big company through bureaucracy or missteps or lack of culture fit or whatever, uh,

you know, destroys, destroys the labor of love that every startup is. That's like, that's just such a tragedy. Right. And it's, and yet, and yet in, in, in turn, the legacy that accrues to the founder when something had is phenomenally successful post-acquisition is,

is, you know, is enormous and you see that. Right. And, and, uh, and so that's why I think this, this, the fit and people being aligned and going about things the same way just matters so much. Cause what you said, um, about that kind of moment in time, Hey, celebrate it. You got the money in the bank. Um, and then when you do a selling the company, it's literally, it's not just the money in the company's bank. It's usually the money in the entrepreneur's bank account. Yeah.

So it's worth celebrating. It's awesome. It's amazing. We always love to celebrate with them. But that's why we test so much in the culture thing. It's like, yeah, literally it's day one. It's the beginning, not the end. And if you aren't fired up about that, by the way, it's okay if you're not. You just got to be honest about it early on. Because if you try to pretend like, oh, yeah, I'm in it for the long haul. I'm so excited for this vision. It's like, we'll figure that out. And then you piece like, that's when you're going to be better, right? You can't fake passion.

Yep. Totally. So true in so many walks of life. Let's move on real quick. We

we do have a followup. We want to make sure we cover this week, uh, that I will just mention briefly, but, uh, Instagram. So, uh, Taylor, one of the things we do is, um, if something new happens, uh, on one of the deals we've covered in the past, uh, we call it out on the show. Um, and in this case, relevant to two episodes we've had in the past, Instagram launched stories. So we covered Instagram as one of our early shows, and then we covered Facebook's failed acquisition of Snapchat. Um,

and super interesting to watch what's happening with Instagram stories. Yeah, I don't want to dive too much into this because it's not the dedicated episode for it, but Facebook is very scared of Snapchat. Snapchat doesn't have the global penetration that Facebook does, so there's plenty of opportunity to defend international turf there, but

They very well should be afraid of Snapchat because of the engagement that they're getting. And it's the first place that people check and where a lot more activity happens than Instagram. And it's really interesting to see Facebook, after having some failed attempts to launch Facebook-branded platforms to disrupt...

snapchat others yep uh instead saying you know what all these kids are already on instagram even though instagram is about that one perfectly curated crafted photo let's see if we can throw this this completely other paradigm into this and and see if instagram can be the one hub for that that generation and i feel like this might even this might merit a future episode yeah yeah if you want to hear that let us know on email or slack um but let's uh let's move on quickly to carve outs um

Taylor, do you want to go first? Absolutely. So my three most recent reads, by the way, I read constantly. I'm sort of, my family, my wife is definitely much more of a purger. And I think if I moved entirely to a Kindle, she'd be happy. But I tend to not only like to read books, but then sort of see them around the house. It just kind of makes me happy. I grew up in one of those households. And so it's just part of life and part of

you know, sort of embracing everything that's out there to be learned. And you can feel like you can never have enough time to get through them all. But the three most recent ones I've read and actually loved all three. One was Mindset by Carol Dweck, which talks about the growth versus fixed mindset. And just phenomenal. And like, look, the basic concept you can embrace and understand in 30 seconds, you know, it's the concept of are you approaching life

you know, with this feeling that everything is fixed and you just got whatever talents you were given in life and that is what it is. And you have to sort of expose those, but not, you know, you don't have a chance to grow. Or do you believe that actually, you know, you have what you have

but it's basically irrelevant. And the question is, you know, what are you going to grow towards through hard work and effort? And what was fascinating about reading the book is when you describe it the way you just did, anyone who's sort of an ambitious type A entrepreneur or, you know, like those of us on this podcast are, I'm sure, thinking, well, I'm a growth person. I'm always trying to get better and it's great. And I read this book and it was very humbling to sort of realize that in some parts of your life you were completely growth-oriented.

In other ways, you had intrinsically sort of had this concept of a fixed mindset that, oh, well, I have talent in that or I don't. And so thinking deeply about that for yourself, for your kids, if you're a parent, for your team, if you're a leader, I thought was incredibly powerful.

Yeah, wow. I was having drinks with a friend the other night and he asked me, so are you more of a routine person or are you like flexible to do whatever? And it was so interesting that, you know, in the work that we do at Pioneer Square Labs, we're super flexible if it's like, hey, you got to fly down to L.A. in two days because, you know, the opportunity for this company is to meet with someone there. Right.

doing that or if it's your marketing today or your product today like all over the place and schedule changes all the time but in my personal life like i need to wake up at the same time and have the exact same morning routine every morning or else i'm not myself and it's amazing how how different we can be in different aspects of our lives and we think of ourselves as either a routine person or a growth person or whatever it is and it's not necessarily unilateral across the board

Yeah. No, totally. That actually, I mean, that makes me think of another one, which, you know, if you're exploring all the podcasts, and this one is, I think, literally...

literally are near the top of the charts, but I've definitely been enjoying Tim Ferriss's one. And I mean, his focus on, um, routines and the questions around morning routines and stuff just fascinates me because I, um, I'm probably, there's things where I'm somewhat routine oriented, but there's a lot of things where I rebel against it and don't want to commit to an absolute strict routine. Um, and, uh, because I kind of like the dynamic that you described of like being ready for the most important thing and hop on the plane and, you know, go do that. And, and, uh, you

It's fascinating to sort of think about how important routines and systems are to success. That's another one I would flag. Before I turn it over, I'll just flag the other two. The second would be Shoe Dog about Phil Knight from Nike and unbelievable entrepreneurial journey and just an incredibly revealing memoir that I really just found illuminating, inspiring, and awesome. But it also, to me...

For you, David, on the venture side, you will come away reading this book, you'll feel like you're doing God's work. I think we underestimate how this concept that capital is almost available from anywhere and that you guys in the venture community, actually I have Adobe Ventures under me as well, so we do this here and there, where it's like we're competing to be the ones who provide capital to the right businesses or whatever. It's like

There was this point in time where like businesses that, you know, are now like changing the world literally couldn't get capital. It was just insane. Like reading the story and I'm not talking about a short period of time, like for like, I can't remember like seven, eight, almost 10 years. He was like on a shoestring and like trying to get these bank loans. It was just crazy. It just, it was, it blew your mind. So it was, that was, that one was phenomenal. David is doing God's work. Let's be clear. Yeah. No, no, no.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Um, and then the last would be originals by, um, by Adam Grant. Um, and, uh, you know, that was just, you know, sort of focusing in on, on creativity and sort of what are the hallmarks of people? Um, and how to, you know, how do they go about that? And, um, and how do you be original and who are the originals and stuff? And so, uh, you know, as I said, I think one of the fun things about software and internet is it, uh, it gives a lot of clay for, uh,

for, for all of us to play with. And, um, you know, you can, you can absolutely be an original if you, if you want to go be. So, uh, um, those three were, those three have been a lot of fun the last, uh, the last probably even two or three weeks. I've kind of churned through all of them. That's awesome. The originals, uh, I hadn't heard of that. I have to add it to my list. Um,

Maybe I'll go next real quick because it picks up on a couple of those themes from a disparate angle. We started the episode on a sports topic, so I can't end it on one. I can't not end it on one given that it's the Olympics right now. And my carve out is if you haven't seen, everybody's got to go watch Simone Biles, the women's gymnast. She is, this girl is like...

the most dominant athlete in her sport I think I've ever seen. She's like, she makes Michael Jordan look like he's in the D league, you know, would be the, uh, the, um, the, the, the comparison. Um, and she just, just now just won the, uh, individual all around gold medal in the Olympics by an enormous margin. Yeah. I've never seen the person who is best in their sport be so far ahead of the entire pack. Yeah. Incredible. And one of the, I was, uh,

watching an interview with her reading an interview with her and one of the things that was said in it reminds me of the mindset Taylor of your carve out when she was a little younger I mean she's still only 19 but when she was a little younger she didn't really have a lot of confidence in herself and would say oh well I just I'm not as good as the other girls you know and like and now that she is like the most dominant athlete that's ever lived in the sport pretty inspiring so that's mine for the week

Yeah, yeah. Love it. Mine's a quickie. I, for those of you who listen to the Alaska Airlines episode, know that I have a thing for airplanes. And there's this incredible video on Vox, it's only 10 minutes long, on the history of the Concorde, how it came to be, how that was funded, what the other supersonic things,

airplane undertakings were and why we don't have supersonic flight today. So if that's for airplane nerds out there, you probably know it all, but it's just a really well put together little 10 minute video. And it's thrilling. So I highly recommend going and checking it out.

Our sponsor for this episode is a brand new one for us. Statsig. So many of you reached out to them after hearing their CEO, Vijay, on ACQ2 that we are partnering with them as a sponsor of Acquired. Yeah, for those of you who haven't listened, Vijay's story is amazing.

Before founding Statsig, Vijay spent 10 years at Facebook, where he led the development of their mobile app ad product, which, as you all know, went on to become a huge part of their business. He also had a front row seat to all of the incredible product engineering tools that let Facebook continuously experiment and roll out product features to billions of users around the world. Yep. Yep. Yep.

So now Statsig is the modern version of that promise and available to all companies building great products. Statsig is a feature management and experimentation platform that helps product teams ship faster, automate A/B testing, and see the impact every feature is having on the core business metrics. The tool gives visualizations backed by a powerful stats engine, unlocking real-time product observability.

So what does that actually mean? It lets you tie a new feature that you just shipped to a core metric in your business and then instantly know if it made a difference or not in how your customers use your product. It's super cool. StatsSig lets you make actual data-driven decisions about product changes instantly.

test them with different user groups around the world, and get statistically accurate reporting on the impact. Customers include Notion, Brex, OpenAI, Flipkart, Figma, Microsoft, and Cruise Automation. There are like so many more that we could name. I mean, I'm looking at the list, Plex and Vercel, friends of the show at Rec Room, Vanta. They like literally have hundreds of customers now. Also, Statsig is a great platform.

for rolling out and testing AI product features. So for anyone who's used Notion's awesome generative AI features and watched how fast that product has evolved, all of that was managed with Statsig. - Yep, if you're experimenting with new AI features for your product and you wanna know if it's really making a difference for your KPIs, Statsig is awesome for that.

They can now ingest data from data warehouses. So it works with your company's data wherever it's stored. So you can quickly get started no matter how your feature flagging is set up today. You don't even have to migrate from any current solution you might have. We're pumped to be working with them. You can click the link in the show notes or go on over to statsig.com to get started. And when you do, just tell them that you heard about them from Ben and David here on Acquired.

That's all we've got. Awesome. That's a wrap. Thanks, everybody, for listening. And most importantly, huge thank you to Taylor for joining us. Yeah, Taylor, where can our audience find you? Yeah, no, I'm, you know, I'm here at Adobe. So feel free to drop me a line at Barada at Adobe.com if you have something you think we should be looking at. I'm also on Twitter at just Taylor Barada and, you know, LinkedIn as well. So feel free to reach out and, you know, happy to chat.

Awesome. And listeners, if you like the show, rate us on iTunes, tweet this episode to your friends, share it wherever you see fit. And thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time.