Business 101 for startups by Fred Wilson
This is my final MBA Mondays post on M&A Issues. I’ve been posting about M&A since last December. It feels like a semester long effort. And frankly I’m a bit tired of talking about M&A every monday. But selling your company is an important topic and I think we’ve done it justice now on MBA Mondays.…
Continue readingM&A Issues: Price
We are getting to the end of the series on M&A. Two more M&A Issues to talk about and then I am done. The final two are consideration and price. Today I’ll talk about consideration and next week I’ll talk about price.
Consideration is the way in which you and your shareholders will get paid. The most…
Continue readingM&A Issues: Consideration
Yet another post in the M&A Issues series. This one is about timing, ie how long it should take from the first serious conversation about a sale transaction until the closing.
I’ve seen acquisitions done in a week. I’ve seen acquisitions take over a year from the first serious conversation to close. And one thing I know…
Continue readingM&A Issues: Timing
Yet another post on issues in M&A. This one is about the things you will sign up to when you sell your business and the money you will set aside to cover them.
First things first. I am not a lawyer. And this post is about legal stuff. I barely know how to spell indemnities. I had…
Continue readingM&A Issues: Reps, Warranties, Indemnities, and Escrows
Continuing our discussion of M&A Issues, we are going to talk about breakup fees today.
A breakup fee is a payment made by the buyer to the seller if the M&A transaction doesn’t close.
Many M&A transactions do not include breakup fees, particularly smaller transactions. But as the value of the transaction rises and the…
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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…
Continue readingM&A Issues: Governmental Approvals
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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For the past month we’ve been doing M&A Case Studies on MBA Mondays. It’s time to go back to the basics of M&A. I laid them out in this post. For the next few weeks, I am going to discuss each of the key issues in detail. First up is the integration plan.
…
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