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Continuing our discussion of M&A Issues, this week we’ll talk about governmental approvals. When two companies combine, the government can sometimes get involved. It mostly happens when two large businesses combine and the most common reason for governmental review is antitrust considerations. It is also possible that foriegn governments can take interest in a business combination.

The…

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We continue our discussion of M&A Issues this week on MBA Mondays. Today we are going to talk about the “stay package.”

When a company acquires your business, they are buying the people as much as anything. Experience has shown that the most successful acquisitions require the team to stick around, at least for a while. But…

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Continue readingM&A Issues: The Integration Plan

This MBA Mondays M&A case study is about the effect that stock option acceleration provisions have on M&A transactions. I am reblogging a blog post that Feedburner founder/CEO Dick Costolo (now Twitter CEO) wrote in the wake of the acquisition of Feedburner by Google. This post is still live on the web at its original location. While…

Continue readingM&A Case Studies: Feedburner

Last week we got a primer on the WhatCounts story and events leading up to the decision to sell the company. This week we are going to hear what a sale process looks like.

There are a bunch of great lessons that come out of this story but my two favorites are doing your diligence on the buyer and only…

Continue readingM&A Case Studies: WhatCounts Sale Process

We continue with our M&A case studies on MBA Mondays. Last week we saw the impact VCs can have on your exit. This week we are going to look at the opposite situation: what happens if you’ve entirely bootstrapped your company. AVC community member @daryn introduced me to David Geller who, over…

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The AVC community’s very own Charlie Crystle has a great story about the sale of ChiliSoft at the height of the late 90s bubble. I’ve asked him to tell it as case study number one in the M&A Case Studies on MBA Mondays.

We will be discussing this case in the comments. There’s a bit…

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Continue readingSelling Your Company

MBA Mondays are back after a week hiatus. We are several posts into a series on Merger and Acquisitions. In our last post, we talked about the key characteristics of mergers and acquisitions. And we touched on the two kinds of purchases, the asset purchase and the company purchase. Today I’d like to talk about the asset…

Continue readingBuying and Selling Assets