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Our presenting sponsor for this episode is not a sponsor but another podcast that we love and want to recommend called the founders podcast. We have seen dozens of tweets that say something like my favorite podcast is acquired and founder so we knew there's a natural fit we know the host of founders well David sender. Hi David. Hey, Ben. Hey David. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. I like how they group us together and then they say it's like the best curriculum for founders and executives. Early as we use your show for research a lot I listen to your episode of the story of a key on marita before we did our Sony episodes is incredible primer. You know, he's actually a good example of why people listen to founders into acquired because all of history's greatest entrepreneurs investors they had deep historical knowledge about the work that came before them. So like the founder of Sony, who did he influence Steve jobs talked about him over and over again if you do the research him. But I think this is one of the reasons why people love both of our shows and there's such good compliments is on acquired we focus on company histories. You tell the histories of the individual people you're the people version of acquired and where the company version of founders listeners the other fun thing to note is David will hit a topic from a bunch of different angle. So I just listened to an episode on Edwin land from a biography that David did David it was the third fourth time you've done Polaroid. I've read five biographies of Edwin land and I think I've made eight episodes of them because in my opinion the greatest such a pretty to do it my favorite entrepreneur personally is Steve jobs and if you go back and listen to like a 20 year old Steve jobs he's talking about Edwin lands my hero. So the reason I did that is because I want to find out like I have my heroes who were their heroes and the beauty of this is the people may die but the ideas never do. So Edwin land had passed away way before the apex of Apple but Steve was still able to use those ideas and now he's gone and we can use this ideas and so I think what acquires doing what founder trying to do as well is find the best ideas in history and push them down the generations make sure they're not lost history. I love that well listeners go check out the founders podcast after this episode you can search for it in any podcast player lots of companies that David covers that we have yet to dive into here on acquired. For more indulgence on companies and founders go check it out. Who got the truth? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Who got the truth now? Is it you? Is it you? Is it you? Sit me down, say it straight. Another story on the way. Who got the truth? Welcome to episode 18 of acquired the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions. I'm Ben Gilbert. David Rosenthal. Today we have a very special episode that kind of breaks the mold of the show. 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 Zingha. And before that he was also relevant to our show, head of CorpDev at Yahoo. He is a JDMBA from Northwestern and after Northwestern, spent a couple of years at Bane 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. So maybe we'll get into that. Lots of deal making in that world. Exactly. I would say looking back on it, I didn't have the language at the time, but there was no real US scene when I came out of college. And so effectively I became a independent solo soccer entrepreneur, had to go 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. I'm not sure why not at 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 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 CorpDev and how you think about deals and acquisitions as you're going through them. So we have a bunch of questions, but it 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 CorpDev 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 podcast and this focus is, I think, filling a nice gap and need because 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 not some big moment of, you know, hey, word for sale. Although, you know, those things do happen, but 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 want to say the wrong thing and all which is totally fair. So, 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 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 value is, we all talk about and 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 enter 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 some way across it, some point in the last couple years, Mark Sisters blog post on investing in lines, not dots. And, you know, I think his concept 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, something better. It develops credibility and you have time to sort of process and have a perspective so that 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. There absolutely is the other sort of 20% case where some companies 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 some sort of interest. From someone else in the space and they decide that they want to talk to others and see 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 those are, 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. And that's a very, very broad 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 customer segment to you guys. What's the context for starting that relationship? Is it a partnership or is it just like, you know, let's not play any games. 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. With, you know, that is context. I think sometimes you get into a scenario of like, well, and I've had, 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 it's like the old saying of, you know, when you want money asked for advice, when you want, you know, advice asked for money and that whole thing. It's like, if you're like calling us asking to be sold, it certainly can happen. But, you know, if your first interaction is that, it puts an awful lot of weight on that interaction and doesn't need to be that way. And I think it also ignores the point which I always make. And when we sort of 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 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 beginning. And is it the, are they the type of people that you want to work with? Do they see the world the same way? And those things sometimes you think that, oh, that doesn't matter. We're just going to sell the highest bidder. And it's like, yes, of course we get that. Everyone gets that. But it doesn't mean that you should ignore all other stakeholders, all other factors. And the way you've sort of sus those out and frankly do 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 conversation. It's certainly fine if there is a specific partnership that seems very interesting with the big company, but those also can be. Class all ways to time every small company thinks that every big company is the keys to the kingdom and a partnership with them will unlock everything. And 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 from them. 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. 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. We'd love to meet this VC that we both know. Thought we should we should get to know each other and not looking for funding, not looking to sell. But we'd 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 to 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 she's your 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 it takes time to build these relationships. What do you think, you know, as you're doing that, maybe talk a little bit about kind of the importance of culture and that relationship and the people fit. I know it's something that's really important to you and Adobe. You know, what 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, you know, extremely large deals, you know, north of billion dollar 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, you know, the company has morphed from, you know, post script and printing tools and things like that, you know, into desktop publishing and then creative tools and now into marketing and, and now, what is your own source of information? It's an acquisition a long time ago. Yes, yeah, again, that's somewhat unique and then it was 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 know, 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 and 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, 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 in one of the reasons why valuing companies is art not science in a strategic acquire scenario versus a private equity or whatnot is that, like, look, it's an 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. And inevitably, we're not like a holding company that's just going to buy great properties and let them roll. We, we, 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, you know, 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. As we did when we went from, you know, creative to marketing with the amateur acquisition. Excuse me, 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. So, execution creates value strategy is what allows you to have the opportunity to get into that mode, but you got to go do it. And I think the one last thing and, you know, we've touched on this a little bit when we were catching up before the call is that to me, if I had to pick one hallmark that gives me a sort of good positive early indicator that we're on the right track. And I think that's one of the things that I think 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. And the only thing is they actually start to embrace the broader vision that we have and say, you know what, I actually think I can expand your vision and I want to get in and if I could if I could work with you guys on that, I can do something bigger. And I think that's what I think is the key to the idea is that you'll see over time that the deals that work really well and where particularly works well for the founders or CEOs is where they end up loving the concept of getting inside a bigger company and maybe they're really people and all this raising money and all this other stuff is 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 won't 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, one was for company called Citizen Sports founder named Mike Kerns. I found that company with another guy named Jeff Ma, who's well known from the bringing down the house days and all that from MIT. So Mike came in and just did phenomenally well and then another was company called Into Now that was founded and spun out by a guy named Adam Kahung. And those two guys stuck around Yahoo for Mike just left about a year ago and I think Adam's still at Yahoo and they rose to be two of Morris's SVPs of product and these were smaller acquisition. So it's not like they came in the door doing that, but they had a real passion for sort of online media and where it could go and sort of 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, it's a classic sign that, that things will work out quite well. It's a, it's really cool to hear you talk about that. We had in one of our early episodes, we had Kurt Delbeni from Microsoft on and we talked about the Accompli acquisition. And he talked about this very fact that, you know, 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, but which is much bigger and more complex, but for Javier at Soltero at Accompli, you know, he's now running all of Outlook. And exactly mere these themes, let's move on if 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 is the, what are the steps in the process when you're actually working through a deal at that point, you know, from L.O.I. to Term She to the definitive agreements. What are the key milestones for you guys? Yeah, and what specifically are you looking for is it cool financial check cool there's no lawsuits against them check cool there your product is growing with users check those sorts of things. Yeah, look, you have ultimately you're going to do a deal, you know, if it makes, you know, strategic sense, the technology product fit is there and and the financials you think makes sense for your shareholders, right? And for us, the fourth one that I would put that over, you know, because it cuts across all of that is just the people that as we've already talked about. So the hard part about the deal is these are all even though we have a quote unquote process and every large acquireer that is sort of a repeat player, right? So all the places that I've been and done this role are definitely in that and you know, the other ones are people like you mentioned some Microsoft, Oracle, Facebook, etc. Repeat players absolutely have a process and there's different flavors in each company has has different places where different types of decisions either take place or which parts of the org are responsible for them. So there's definitely a number of different ways to do it. But it's, you know, every deal is is its own, you know, sort of perfect snowflake, they're all snowflakes. So they're deals and there's unbelievable, you know, correlations from them and when you get into the to the grain or, you know, everyone is decided we're going to make this happen. And 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 hard core sort of auction process and a higher to bank or whatever, but it's a place where you sort of think, well, but 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 bandwidth and emotional energy and sort of exploring this. How would we do it? So typically, there's usually an early meeting, you know, with a someone in the business unit that's responsible for the product area that's where there is the strategic interest in the overlap and trying to get an understanding for the product vision, the product technology, you know, maybe a bit of a demo. And I think that's a little early point of view on numbers and I think sometimes it can be tough to decide, you know, when do you share what? And I think, you know, we're always fine if an entrepreneur 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 have checkpoints like, you know, 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. They better think about it and they want to talk to a handful of people that are sort of the logical fits for that business and say they decide we're one of them. And then, you know, sort of check in with us, you know, we will oftentimes do at least one call without an NDA where we just sort of say, you know, tell us the story and we'll go through that. So there's sort of a high level business product check early on. When 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 acquires is kind of the L.O.I. or the term sheet and that almost always, and I truly mean almost always, includes a no shop provision, you know, at some period of time, you know, typically sort of 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. So funny how they parallel. You're going to have, 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 what is being done. Every big company has slightly nuanced ways of doing things and because we are repeat players and lawyers 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 where the leverage lies depends on how much those things get negotiated by the buyer of 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 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, you know, a day minimum. And then oftentimes two or three days of kind of a deep dive take us through the business, you know, beginning to end in terms of go through the product, go through the go to market, you know, go through the financials, go through the operations, go through the technology architecture, et cetera. And then, you know, that's when you build, build out a, you know, a very detailed data room. 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 were working with a couple of outside agencies and they didn't have them sign an intervention assignment agreement. That's of a stuff. Like, those are at this point, I saw that more 10 years ago than I do today. I think the breadth of, you know, startup legal advice and sort of smart experienced angels as well. Certainly the venture community, you just people tend to have a pretty buttoned up shop, particularly if they're venture back and things are pretty clean. But if you're outside of the valley and maybe the company was lucky enough to grow, you know, boots draft 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 is in the things something you got to sort of work around. So you drive through that at some point you put in place a definitive agreement where, you know, our lawyers will put together an acquisition agreement depending on if it's share purchase or an asset purchase, et cetera. 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, you know, compares vision and strategy and digs in with with CorpDev. How involved is the business owner throughout that entire process? Are they in every single meeting, you know, 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 CorpDev. 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 valuation that everyone feels good about, right? So, I very much try to make it clear to people who, 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 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 that 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 and troves 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, head of the whole business unit. 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 sometimes it can be fine. 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 in Corp. Dev, been able to kind of frame it and and sus out in combination with you sort of your business well enough that then we can do it. And then we can effectively translate and help people understand why this is exciting why this matters. They might take one meeting and be like, I wasn't interested. And then and then it creates a uphill battle where Corp. Dev and the business owner are like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We got to spend a little more time on those things. It's interesting. Right. And so trust me out. It's so true. 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, 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 because ultimately it's it's not like a enterprise software or sort of SaaS. You're going in 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, we're done. Like get it done. Right. It's a, it's a. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a collaboration collaborative dance where both sides are evaluating each other and getting to know each other and you can't, I mean. it's, 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 vision is aligned and you should care about this. you should care about this. It's so fun 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 partnership and like, nothing will kill a deal faster than that. Yeah. Yeah. And there's less issue with that here because, you know, we're not a partnership. There's a, there's a natural organizational structure to a big company. But you're still going to someone that think has influence, but actually has no context on the relationship and back to that being the most important thing. 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 like, there's almost no misstep that you can't get over if actually it makes business sense. Right. 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 collaboration to figure out whether or 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 it 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 and so it's part of that. But if you overmanage that and overplay it at the wrong, wrong times, 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've never not done a deal, but I've had deals where it was much harder to get there because we, someone figured out some way to get in front of either the CEO or some, you know, some other head of a business owner 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 a job. Where to bring that whole thread back around to the core question, you know, that US, I think it was Ben. The business owner or that sort of head of product is actually an extremely important relationship as well. Like you should have a sense of where, you know, if you were King for Day and ran that business, where would you think that, you know, 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. 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, again, it's, it's, this probably also is like the venture. It's very organic and wherever you have an in, you know, in an awardmentro, take the warm intro and then ask the questions of, you know, hey, should I talk to someone in Corp. Dev or whatever. I have business unit partners 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, I'll 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. Desiree or can you meet with them? That's the other thing. Other times we're, you know, we've partnered with the business unit to develop a strategy and overall, and we kind of know the spaces that we're particularly interested in. We'll find a relationship or a company and we'll get in trouble and we'll pass them through. I think that is one difference between the VC and M&A world is that sourcing is not some big magical thing. And, 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 we're out there in the market. There's only so many acquires. People will find us nine out of ten times. If you're lucky as a VC firm, you also are in that position. Most of us aren't that lucky. But this might be a good, actually good way to transition into sort of the next category that we talk about on the show is acquisition category. 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 you're looking at different companies and then they tend to fall like, are you guys thinking like, this is definitely an aqua hire or like, oh, this could be like a huge business line acquisition or, you know, how is that going through your heads? Yeah, I mean, look, there's industry stores standard, lingo, you know, aqua hires, tech and talent deals, you know, like, you know, whatever sort of business acquisitions or product acquisitions, those types of things are definitely, those have heard those use. We've used those all the time. We don't get too hung up on it. You know, one construct I've used inside of our businesses, you know, from my Bane days I had a respect for some of the profit from the core analysis and they've done, there's actually a book written a number of years ago called Profit From The Core and they've done analysis of like 2000 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, understanding the business that drives the most profits and it's sort of the most enduring from a perspective of, you know, who is the customer? What's the channel to 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 percent chance of success but once you got out like three or four of those things changed, you dropped off to like 10 percent 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 focus, you know, the resources of the company on, right? So something like Omnature, 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 in 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. It was after that that we moved from creative suite to creative cloud. So that was in hindsight a very risky big bet. Yeah. But it was a large big business that had, it was the market leader had real momentum and so you could make that bet. And then if you, you know, focused on the rest of the things that you could control, you know, it's ended up being a, you know, $2 billion plus, you know, it's on the road to being more than that business force. 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, like meaning we're already in that part of the business, that's where we're more likely to look for, you know, some tech and talent, you know, smaller kind of deals or we look for like a little bit of a core expansion where it's kind of like a one step, you know, adjacency where maybe we get a new product with a bit of a business around it's been proven in the market, but it's, you know, it's not scaled yet. We bring that in and we scale it. The marketing cloud in many ways are 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, you know, year after year that 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 sales person'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, particularly, you know, all the networks and everything with the social networks and platforms we've seen have changed the dynamics there a bit. But, you know, historically that was a little bit of Yahoo's original strategy was, okay, we have this portal. Let's just keep adding on things, right? That was before my time of year, 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. Moving on to our next segment, we always talked about what would have happened otherwise. And it's the part where we try and figure out, you know, if this deal didn't go through where there are other requires or, you know, what 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. And it's a question of what look at means, right? Yeah. You know, we've historically done sort of forward 10 plus deals a year. I mean, I think actually the market strategy is 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're going to make sure that the ones we do are going to work. And Adobe's, I mean, we've had bankers come in and be like, what are you guys doing? How do you do it? And because everyone around the valley is sort of saying that the ones you're doing seem to be working. And I think a lot of it is just a willingness to say no. And that starts at the top. And we have a CEO, Sean Tannin Ryan, who, you know, I describe as having founder level passion for, he's been here 19 years, he's been CEO nine. No different than a founder who just feels it in their bones and feels that level of passion for protecting the mission and the vision that we're going after. And what that means is it's a very high bar on what makes it through the, the ribacon of strategy fit, tech fit, team fit, financial expectations, et cetera. And so you have to be willing to say no. And in order to make sure that you, you know, you get the right ones, you have to be careful that doesn't make you risk averse and not moving quick enough and fast enough. But 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, on both the seller and the buyer side. You know, so you're probably looking at that plus or minus a thousand in bounds a year. I mean, could we probably get two to five emails a day with, hey, would you be interested in checking us out? That's what I think. Yeah. A lot of those, yeah, I mean, a lot of those the answers and it's probably again, no different than VC. For us, it's just like, hey, that's not a fit, but I appreciate you thinking of us. And we try hard to give quick answers and quick knows if we just don't think it's worth it and we don't win those 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, you know, what technology themes are, are 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 what, you know, how has, how have you tackled M&A differently at the different companies you've been at and how have you guys taken a different kind of strategic or organizational approach between each one? Yeah. Again, M&A is a tool. I mean, I've always joked that 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. 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 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've tons of respect for those guys because I think their jobs are really, really hard and they only get paid if things get done. So, and they oftentimes get a bad rap and there's, you know, I think there's a lot of great ones out there. But the, 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 in different companies? I'd say at Yahoo, we were going in a lot of different directions when I got in there. We were, this was 0809 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, top down. And then you'd get the inevitable, hey, we got a call and supposedly Google is looking at buying this. And I was like, so, you know, like that's not a strad, like doing what you're competitive and doing is not a strategy, right? So we spent time around getting alignment around strategy. We spent time around locking in the concept of, from a process perspective of an executive sponsor so that, so that you got the alignment early, top down on strategy. And then it made sure that when we were spending time on things, it tied to that. But frankly, Minyahu had a reputation and we worked hard on this, but it was just a little bit of the reality. At some point of the culture was, you know, we had a reputation of 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 just feeling like this monolithic bureaucratic thing. And it wasn't. 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 Zenga, I mean, we had, the company had been founded like three years before. I mean, Mark seems incredibly aggressive, dynamic entrepreneur. If he believed it made sense and we could convince him that we could go do it. So 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 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 was like being in a movie, I was like find those guys. You know? And so some other team got the, 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, no, like are you crazy? And I was like, great. We'll be there at one o'clock. And we like popped 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 had the sort of tiger by the tail in terms of, you know, what was happening with social and everything. We knew the categories that we needed to add from a social gaming perspective. You need to find the teams to go do them because we didn't have enough people in the house to do it. It was that type of voracious growth. And so it made strategic business sense to try to move that fast. And part of it was just again, the culture at the top. It just, look, I guess my point is the culture of the company, the strategy of the company, where it is in the arch of its growth, will define what process it creates and how it goes about it. And then also what it, what it sort of means. And you know, at Adobe, we have these bigger arcs that we're working against. And you know, the thing, the, from corporate strategy perspective, what we've been focused on for several years are sort of three big turns. One is, as I sort of say, everyone in both the consumer and the enterprise side has been dealing with, it's just this unbelievable wave of mobile. And like, you know, 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. They just looked at the pivot they did. And I was there at Zanga when they were trying to figure that out. And if, you know, 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 heights. And it's like every year when Mary Meeker, now at Client of Perkins Formula, more and 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 the mobile. And every year, it 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 is just naturally making your business exceed expectations. So that was one. It's like, make mobile a tailwind across our entire business. 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 an 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 sort of theirs. And it's a hybrid approach that I think you're starting to see emerge in the 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 I really sort of came from outside in analysis of what was happening, not just in our own space, but actually was happening across the broader landscape, including the consumer world that I've sort of seen at YAHL once again. Yeah, that's great. It's really cool. The kind of next section before, I guess our last section before we do Carbouts is 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 line. 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 success metrics of yes, that was a good acquisition and we should do more things like this. So one of the things that our teams responsible for underneath is the M&A integration function. And I've always felt like that's a critical to be combined in the same same group because otherwise it breeds a behavior that sort of feels like, hey, we're just responsible for banging out the deal. Yeah. That's a matter of you throw it over the wall and someone else will integrate it. That's a thing. And I think that's what I think is my self 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 partner with the business owner and sort of be CEO of that growth opportunity until 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's been the right hand person from an operational perspective. There's like three other functions that are going to serve that purpose for them. And they're actually the 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 going to, their importance is going to go up post acquisition, those types of nuances. If you're not focused on the integration, when you're doing the deal, you just do things differently. 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 post mortem evaluation process, we commit to reporting out to, 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, there, as you might imagine, there's 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 every once in a while, we'll do a more formal, deep dive post mortem if something hasn't gone well. You know, nothing ever, 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, you know, this is not NBA free thrice shooting. It's much more Hall of Fame baseball hitting, you know, meaning for those that aren't sports fans, you know, it's not 70, 80, 90%. It's probably plus or minus, you know, 30% is not all bad. And our track record at Adobe is actually, you know, dramatically higher than that. And every now and then, it's like you make a lemonade out of lemons where things didn't work out what you expected into, but you have the right team and the culture fit and the product 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 marketplace out differently, you can still create value. There are definitely companies that have meaningful hundreds of millions dollar bets that are effectively swinging 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 post board, I mean, 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 it would sort of changes the upfront. I love that as a way to wrap it too that culture is what's going to drive. Things are, it's interesting to to think about back to this analogy with venture. Like the happiest day of the next two years of your company is going to be when you close that round. And then the real hard work starts. It's the entrepreneurial drive that's going to keep founders engaged when life is quite challenging. And I'm sure that's the same after an acquisition inside the company and it gets back to if it's not the right culture fit, you're not going to have that drive to keep going. 100%. And it can be sad too because you see it where 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 you know women and it's like they can't be more bitter. Something they poured their life into, they feel wasn't respected and honored and whatnot. And sometimes you know the marketplace out differently and they get that and that's that. A big company through bureaucracy or missteps or lack of culture fit or whatever you know destroys, destroys the labor of love that every startup is. That's just such a tragedy right? And yet in turn the legacy that accrues to the founder when something that is phenomenally successful post acquisition is enormous and you see that right? And so that's why I think this fit and people being aligned and going about things the same way it just matters so much. Because what you said about that kind of moment in time, hey celebrate it, you got the money in the bank and then when you do us selling the company it's literally it's not just the money in the company's bank, it's usually the money in the entrepreneurs bank account. So it's worth celebrating, it's awesome, it's amazing. We always love to celebrate with them but it's like that's why we test so much. The one thing is like yeah it's day 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 I'm in it for the long arm, so excited vision is 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 and so many walks of life. Let's move on real quick. We do have a follow up, we want to make sure we cover this week that I will just mention briefly but Instagram. So Taylor one of the things we do is if something new happens on one of the deals we've covered in the past we call it out on the show and in this case relevant to two episodes we've had in the past Instagram watch stories so we covered Instagram as one of our early shows and then we covered Facebook's failed acquisition of Snapchat 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 you know Facebook is very scared of Snapchat. Snapchat doesn't have the global penetration that Facebook does so there's you know 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 the kind of it's the first place that people check and where a lot more activity happens in Instagram and it's really interesting to see Facebook after having some failed attempts to launch Facebook branded platforms to disrupt Snapchat. Snapchat. Yeah, 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 completely other paradigm into this and see if Instagram can be the one hub for that generation. Yeah, 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 but let's let's move on quickly to Carvouts. Taylor, did you want to go first? Absolutely, so my three most recent reads, I'm by the way I read constantly, I'm sort of my family and my wife is definitely much more of a perjure and I think if I moved entirely to a Kindles she'd be happy but I tend to not only like to read books but then sort of see them around the house that just kind of makes me happy. I grew up in one of those households and so it's just part of the 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 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 you know what are you going to grow towards through hard work and effort and what was fascinating by reading the book is when you describe it the way you just did anyone who's sort of in you know ambitious type A entrepreneur or you know like 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 was very humbling to sort of realize that in some parts of your life you were completely growth oriented and other ways you had intrinsically and sort of had this concept of a fixed mindset that oh well yeah I just I have talent 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 always haven't 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 were super flexible if it's like hey you got to fly down to LA in two days because you know the opportunity for this company is to meet with someone there 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 also not myself and it's amazing how different we can be in different aspects of our lives when we think of ourselves as either routine person or 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 if you're exploring all the podcasts and this one is is I think literally you're near the top of the charts but I've definitely been a joint Tim Ferriss is one and I think his focus on routines and the questions around morning routines and stuff just fascinates me because I am 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 and 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 to that and and it's fascinating to sort of think about how important routines and systems are to success that's another one I would fly. I'll before I turn it over I'll just flag the other two the second would be a shoe dog about Phil Knight from Nike and unbelievable entrepreneurial journey and just an incredibly revealing memoir that I've really just found illuminating inspiring and awesome but it also to me you know for for for you David on the adventure side it will give you you like you'll you will come away reading this book you'll feel like like you're doing God's work. You know because I think we I think we underestimate how we this concept that that capital is almost available from anywhere and that you know you guys in the venture community and actually I have Adobe Ventures under me as well so we we we do this here and there is it you know where it's like we're competing to be the ones who provide capital to the right businesses or whatever and 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 is 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 ten years it was like on a shoe string 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 I exactly. Yeah exactly. Exactly. And then the last would be originals by Adam Grant and you know that was just you know sort of focusing on creativity and sort of what are the hallmarks of people and how to you know how do they go about that and how do you be original and who are the originals and stuff and so you know as I said I think one of the fun things about software and Internet is it gives a lot of clay for for all of us to play with and you know you can you can absolutely be an original if you want to go be so those three were those three have been a lot of fun the last last probably two or three weeks of kind of churned through all them. That's awesome. The originals hadn't heard of that I've added to my list. Yeah maybe I'll go next real quick because it picks up on a couple of those themes from a from a disparate angle we we started the episode on a sports topic so I can't ended on one I can't not ended 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 and then 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 the the the comparison and she just just now just won the individual around gold medal in the Olympics by an enormous margin. Yeah I've never seen the person who was best in their sport be so far ahead of the entire pack. Yeah incredible and one of the I was 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 tailor of your carve out when she was a little younger when 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 love it. It'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 is only 10 minutes long on the history of the Concorde how it came to be how that was funded what the other supersonic 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 a little 10 minute video and it's thrilling so highly recommend going and checking it out. 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 baritadeobee.com if you have something you think we should be looking at I'm also on Twitter at just Taylor Barrettom 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.