Some more thoughts about M&A I know 'a guy' tha
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I know 'a guy' that worked at a large tech company that had a team devoted to M&A. It felt like they were buying a company every week.
One day they let the whole M&A team go. Some really smart, hardworking people. Everyone was confused why the heck would they do that. A few weeks or month or so later the company announced a merger with another tech company. At the time, it was the largest software deal in history. Stock prices tripled at open.
Now everything made sense. You don't need a M&A team if you are not doing M&A anymore or the other company already has one.
One sign of a large deal coming is when staff gets adjusted. The reasons why you do M&A is the synergies and efficiencies they bring. You don't need to separate HR departments, two separate payroll systems, two marketing departments, two account departments and the list goes on and one. You do need people to support both companies, but you certainly don't need overhead back office tech.
This didn't happen when Sound Concepts and Verb came together because Verb didn't have a lot of employees to begin with so it worked out well. It didn't happen when Verb bought Solofire because they didn't have a lot of employees.
Now what happens if Verb buys, merges, whatever with a sizable, profitable SaaS company? If it has a bunch of employees you start adjusting on both sides sometimes before the acquisition.
I see some changes happening on the Verb side. Could be just a coincidence. Then again, we all might be surprised. Maybe the 10% pop in Verb yesterday was because some don't like to be surprised?