Why Pendo Buys Startups (And It’s Not for Revenue) with Todd Olson

This episode is brought to you by dealroom, the only M and A platform for buyer led M and A. If you're running multiple deals a year and still relying on legacy BDRs and generic project management tools, you're not just wasting time, you're overspending. Teams using Deal room see a 40% reduction in execution costs thanks to built in diligence workflows, easy permissioning and automated task tracking. It replaces multiple tools, your vdr, PM software, and even a bunch of spreadsheets with a single source of truth for the entire deal life cycle. You'll also save hours on contract review with AI that pulls key terms and risks automatically, helping you move faster and more confidently. M and A is hard enough. Deal Room gives you the structure, automation and visibility to do it right with the without blowing your budget. Check it out@dealroom.net or tap the link in the episode description here's to the deal. I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies and what actually happened during M and A deals. Foreign welcome to M and A Science. This podcast is part of a mission to rethink how M and A is done. The old school Settle that approach. It's dead fire led. M and A is all about strategy, alignment and efficiency, putting value creation at the center of every deal. And let's be real, it's not just about closing the deal, it's about making it successful. We uncover what truly works in M and A by learning directly from the best. I'm your host, Kisan Patel, founder and CEO of dealroom and Chief Scientist at M and A Science. Joining me on the podcast is Todd Olson, co founder and CEO of Pendo. If you're in SaaS, you already know the name. Todd's led Pendo from startup to scale up with a product first mindset and a sharp eye for customer experience. What's more interesting for this conversation? He's taken a refreshingly different approach to M and A, one that's less about revenue and more about people, product and culture. This episode we dig into how Todd thinks about buy versus build, the role of founders, post acquisition, and why speed and entrepreneurial energy matter more than the playbooks. Todd, how you doing?

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. Thanks for having me.

Thanks for hosting me in your New York office.

Yeah, it's wonderful to have you here. So, hello, New York office.

Yeah, absolutely. Can we kick things off a Little bit about your background.

Yeah. So I'm Todd. I'm the CEO, co founder of Pendo. This is the third venture funded startup that I founded, so you could call me a serial entrepreneur. I have traditionally been in a more technical role, so I've been coding since I was a teenager and worked professionally actually since then. So I've always been sort of in a cto Chief Product Officer role. This is the first company from Start where I've been the CEO. I've been in a position where I've been acquired. Prior to Pendo, I have led acquisitions at other companies as well. So M and A is something that I do have some experience with, some decent experience through my sort of 30 year tech career. As you said, a lot of people in SaaS know who Pendo is. But just a brief introduction about Pendo. Pendo is a company that's really on a mission to improve software experiences. Software runs most companies and runs the world and Pendo helps make sure that software delivers on its value to its users.

I asked my team because we use Pendo.

Yeah.

So I asked them to explain to me because I haven't used it and they said I can almost quote this. It helps us track activity adoption rate of new features and enables easy in platform communications with our users, especially around things like events we're doing.

Oh, there you go. There's a great description. It's always better when the customer says it.

There you go. The background is interesting. Third venture, how come they trusted you to be CEO now or the skills that have trusted?

I mean when I started the company I said I really want to be CEO and given I was one of the founders, it's kind of how it all worked out. And I've done other podcasts around why that was important to me. But throughout my career, if you come from a technical background like myself, you often can have some level of imposter syndrome around like being the CEO around the non techie stuff like sales and marketing and even finance. I don't have a degree in those things. I don't necessarily have lots of experience scaling those things. And guess what? It's true. I don't. You could argue now maybe I do. I wasn't as focused on it, but throughout my entrepreneurial experience what I saw was like, you don't need that stuff actually in many instances to be good at this job. And look, I wanted to crack at it. It really comes down to I wanted to crack at it. And I guess I'm still doing it, so I like it. And it suits me.

I guess the thing I've learned from doing these podcasts, you can learn the soft skills but you can't go back and learn the engineering skills. There's a certain window that you need to learn those in.

I'd like to think that my background as an engineer helps me approach problems in a very disciplined way. And the fact that I understand technology and guess what, we're a technology company at our core. We build software and we sell it. Having a background and knowing how to build software, yeah, it's useful. It's never not useful, I can tell you that.

One of the things I've noticed is from the get go you've taken a pretty proactive buyer led approach. Something that I distilled into a framework just looking how organizations evolve from doing their first acquisitions where maybe banker presented a deal, very reactive process and after you do a number of deals, your process evolves and becomes more and more buyer led in terms of just thinking through the whole end state, how you can integrate the company and so forth. Now it makes sense. With your intro, you've been on the other side being acquired, you've been involved with M and A right away from the beginning. It's like you're already putting a lot of the best practices in play. The general direction I wanted to go is as this early stage company. How do you know when it's time to do M and A?

The fact that I had done it before, two of my other, actually maybe all four of the co founders had all been part of M and A transactions. It just means that it wasn't a foreign concept. You weren't completely affected, afraid of it. Now you don't want to rush it and do it too soon. You could argue when you're creating a company, you're building culture, going and immediately squashing or merging that culture with another culture is going to have unforeseen consequences if you don't have some confidence and really some good foundation. So I feel like we didn't go out and start really doing an M and A until I felt like we had a decent foundation. And for us that ended up being about three and a half, four years in. So we made our first acquisition in 2017, which is very early for a company. We were for context, a 90 person company. We were probably around 10 million in ARR. We had just concluded our series B, but we're contemplating a series C. So we were not a big company when we actually performed our first transaction. And look at it, it comes down to accelerating Roadmap going faster and bringing on skill sets you just don't have. That's really what it's about for me. And so if I go back to 2017, we were a company that primarily worked on websites, web products, web based software, and there's a lot of web based software in the world and we're doing well and we were growing really fast, but we had obviously a major gap and we didn't support mobile at all. And obviously a lot of companies have mobile apps and those mobile apps are important part of how those companies deliver experiences to their users. So we knew we had to do it. This isn't a question of do we need to do mobile or not, should we do this or not? And we had probably just one engineer full time working on it and guess what? We made almost no progress on it. Like one engineer trying to support every mobile framework. Just think about that practically. And we'd go to these off sites and one thing may come up in this conversation. I like to run a tight cadence with my direct reports. So every quarter we're doing quarterly planning, every year we're doing annual planning. The number of times our leadership team gotten almost yelling matches about mobile around we're not investing in it, we don't take it seriously. And I'd say it's moving too slowly. It was a fight. Finally when we saw this and then we started exploring and getting introduced to companies that had expertise in here, we learned we just don't know what we don't know on this problem domain and we are not experts in it. And we can try to hire a bunch of experts or we can go out and acquire a team that's already built a product that seems to be a good product. I like their vision. They have skillsets. That's kind of like what led it to us. It's that first opportunity and that kind of like started it all for us.

The first deal was basically around bridging a roadmap gap. We're picking that mobile. It's not progressing that fast. Why don't we acquire. Was it the strategy got clarified that we should go acquire this capability. Then you went on a search or did the company pop up and then you just.

Company did pop up. It came up from one of our investors. They wanted to make an intro. I spoke with the founder, we talked about it. It seems interesting. But then I'll never forget this is an Israeli company. I'd never been to Israel my entire life. Myself, my co founders, we get on a plane, we fly into Tel Aviv, for the very first time, we go on site to this customer and they started doing a demo. It blew me away. I was like, wow, it looked magical. It basically looked like what Pendo did for the web, but for mobile. And yeah, obviously there's some differences. It wasn't a complete one for one replica, but it was pretty darn close and it felt as magical. Our product fell and I'm like, I want that. Our customers will want that. That fits how we think about product design. That sort of matches our vision. It's just for different type of application, mobile based applications. It was really like the product hooked me and then of course then the team and the process and all the other stuff was check the box. But yeah, yeah, I'll never forget that first meeting. Cause really, look, at the end of the day, I'm a product person. I fall in love with the product. It's like, yeah, and that's part of your job. Your job is, you know, your customer bases and your users, you know what they love and what they love about your products. When you see something that's like lines, it's like, oh, our customers are going to like love this. And I think still to this day, if you talk to our customers, it is pretty amazing. It's beautiful in the way it's implemented, in the way it works and in some ways still magical. And this is years later, but all the box checked on this one.

You go hear about the company, have a brief introduction, the team flies out, you meet them in Tel Aviv. Super impressed with the product. That's what gets you excited. It sounds like you're pretty impressed with the team. To get to know the team and seeing that there could be a good working relationship. And it's all underpinned by the fact that the customer is going to love putting all this stuff together.

Yeah, exactly. Fast forward to today. That is what, at least eight years later, core engineers are still here. We still have an office there. We've grown that office. Of course, it's a major hub for Pendo. And yeah, the fact that we still have people from that original company, Butcher is titled, but like distinguished engineer, basically the highest level of engineer that we have. We have an individual in that office and we have several very, very senior engineers still part of the company and really proud of the way that's gone and still a lot of innovation happening in mobile. All out of that office.

Yeah, but this was already part of the company strategy was to get into mobile.

It was, we knew we had to do it, but it was Going way too slowly.

You didn't necessarily have a proactive M and A search this sort of company came, but it did align with the company strategy. So then it's. There's a pretty clear business case to put together.

Yeah, it feels opportunistic.

The investors that came and said, hey, you guys should look at this.

One of our investors is one of their portfolio companies. But the crazy thing, sometimes things work out the way you plan it. Not always, but this is one of the ones where we were in the middle of negotiating this whole transaction and I kind of went to our management team. It's like, look, here's the order of operations. We're going to negotiate this transaction in parallel, try to raise our Series C at the exact same time. Because we'll need the Series C in order to actually complete this transaction and have enough cash, all the details. So it all works if we can close this and then close that, boom, all within a month. And we did that. I was fortunate. I just hired our cfo who, she's still with the business like a month before this, and said, hey, you have to close up financing and you have to, we have to buy a company all within two months. For two months in the job and by the way, on board. And it was crazy, crazy, crazy time in the company. It was called 2017. Sort of an inflection point for us. Before that, we had only one office. It was in Raleigh that year. We expanded, actually. We opened our first New York office that year. We opened San Francisco that year. Then of course, we opened Israel that year. So we added three offices in a single year. So just a crazy explosive year for us.

How is there any nuances with doing this deal in Israel?

Yeah, of course, it's one thing to.

Do your first deal, then you're doing it internationally.

I know you have to hire international counsel. A lot of the bylaws are. I feel like we're in Hebrew. We had to get people to read them and translate them. We had all these employment agreements that were different the way they do equity is slightly different. So yes, it was different. And then that company had some sales team in the US So we sort of integrated some of those folks as well. You go back to people too. Some fascinating nuggets from that acquisition. One, their CFO. We moved to the U.S. he was a longtime VP of Finance at Pendo. He went on to be sort of a CFO of another American based company. So that's a life changing move. We had a woman who was writing blog posts for this Small startup in Israel that we moved to the U.S. we put her as editor in chief of a product brand called productcraft. Fast forward today. Now we have Mind the Product, which is the largest independent brand. So that was the early workings of this community strategy. If community's been a big part of our strategy. She ran the first community Fast forward a few years. She runs all brand for Pendo. When she departed, she became the chief marketing officer of a venture capital fund. So here's a person running blog posts for a company we bought back in Israel in 2017, now the CMO of EC. So when you think about that, there was just amazing talent at this little startup that when put in the right environment and I'd like to think we're a very good environment for strong talent, they just took off. That's part of the magic of acquisitions is people that self select into entrepreneurial companies, into startups. Some of them have incredible bars that you just need to give them the environment to flourish and watch them grow. This one had a lot of great examples. I'm very, very proud of that aspect of this story.

People is a big value driver. The strategy was tied to essentially the tech capability to bridge a roadmap.

Correct.

Was it revenue is a factor at all in this deal?

Yeah, look, we looked at the number of customers that we knew had mobile applications that we weren't servic and we sort of did a classic M and A mile has some level of attach rate. Attach rate is for existing customers and prospective new customers. Which percentage of them can you like upsell this additional capability? And we had a forecasted attach rate and that essentially is revenue generating and a big part of our thesis. And you'll see us do this and you mentioned it in your preamble, we rarely acquire for the revenue itself. And this company did have some revenue, but not one that's memorable. I don't remember how much it was.

It was more about the potential of.

What the potential is. Hey, look, we had a good sales team at the time. They knew to sell Pendo. We figured they could figure out to sell Pendo for mobile. It's the same product, it's just for different types of apps. And that was the ultimate thesis. And that's how it's part of our strategy today.

There's a big bet on being able to integrate this technology into your tech stack. When I talk to folks and it's always the hey, we miscalculated everything and then you have a Frankenstein product afterwards or things didn't integrate a year later.

Yeah, we screwed this up. We screwed this up. And I'll tell you what screwed it up. And it's just honestly, probably one of my weaknesses. One of the organ. I always joke if it's. If I have a weakness, the company probably has a weakness. So we are impatient human beings. I'm a wildly impatient human being. We get a lot. So when you're an impatient human being, you buy something, you're like, it's pretty good. I fell in love with the demo. Let's just go sell this to customers now. Let's get some revenue. Now. It works because you want to announce something, get all the PR around it, get the little TechCrunch article. Customers are going to call, prospects are going to call. You want to start taking some orders and get some wins. That is a natural motion. You want wins, I want wins. I want revenue. Basically always. So that is my standard mode. We should not have done that. That was a mistake. Because then you start selling something and it was like our entire product was hosted on gcp, but they were hosted on aws. Now we're managing AWS and gcp. Fast forward today, by the way, I think we finally got the last customer off AWS like last year. So it is 2024 from 20. You can do the math on how many years we had to support two different stacks. They had such an inconsequential amount of revenue to us at the time. We should have stopped selling, completely rewrote. It's really the back end, the front end, didn't really need to change. Rewrote the backend and our backend on GCP and just gone for it. And we just didn't. We didn't.

We preserve their tech stack and then we're trying to cry.

We thought it was good enough. We're impatient, we just go after it. And now eventually we did, of course, yes, that is all rewrite in 2019, maybe 2020, we had this massive project, rewrite the whole backend and look, we succeeded in. Now it's fully integrated now. It's like exactly what you have wanted from day one. Now if I had started that way, could we have gotten there? Yeah, we probably gotten there faster. The other interesting fact, I'll tell this story because it's actually a funny one as well. This startup that we acquired thought they're going to sell and I'm not only in the bank, but one of the largest banks in Europe. A million dollar deal. It was in the pipeline. Their head of sales was like, it's coming next quarter. We're going to close the deal. So look, I acquired this company, they have a million dollar deal in their pipeline and I want that deal. I want it a million dollars. That would have been our first million dollar customer at the time. And we were like yes, this is amazing. So of course once we acquire the company then you know, our sales team takes over. My CRO takes over, I take over. And we were vetting it and this is a real deal. Okay, caveat, they will only work on aws. At the time the bank had yet not yet certified Google cloud for hosting. So prefer cloud provider. So we did this dance with this company for nine months. And the crazy thing is this company because they really wanted this product so badly, they would kept paying us money at for trial. They weren't even using the product. They were just paying us to keep us talking with them because they wanted the product so badly. Again all on aws, but they kept doing it. So part of our calculus was trying to get this million dollar deal. Finally after three or four quarters of trying to get this deal, talking to our board about this deal, watching my stupid pipeline not move on this deal, we fired the customer which is, it's very hard to fire a customer like that. It would have been a game changing customer for Pendo at the time, even then. And I can tell you what, the team felt so good after doing that. Probably underappreciate how much stress they were having around how we're going to support this million dollar customer on this stack that we know we're throwing away on all this old tech. When we want to invest in the new tech, we want to be aligned. The team actually wanted to integrate the products. But this customer was the reason we didn't. Because we knew that the only way we're going to win them is by supporting his whole stack and firing that customer. Being one of the best decisions I've ever made at Pendo. And it felt so hard at the time. Like any good decision, it felt so obvious after the fact. I agonized over this decision for weeks, maybe months. And then the day after I felt like a massive weight was lifted off my shoulders. Guess what? We started moving faster. Each decision was a little bit easier. We've obviously now have multiple million dollar customers and many of whom use our mobile app. We're going to come. That's an incredible lesson and making sure you have the right customer at the right time.

So you're picking up a lot of this. The engineering knack versus Longview.

Correct.

Being open with the Lessons learned. Because that go to market is one that people clinch on and you get aggressive on doing it.

Correct.

But then you got to get the tech integration, which people don't talk about that. That's got to align just as well.

Yeah. And look, like I said, it's one of my weaknesses. And like, you go to our next acquisition, which was in 2019, a company called Receptive in Sheffield, UK, they had a bunch of customers, but they had very low average contract value customers. So they had a ton. And we decide to keep it on as well and not integrate the backend. Guess what? We just finished integrating last year. The whole product is now one product. By the way, you're always going to do it. If you think you're not, you're just lying to yourself. And the funny thing is, despite the fact that we're experienced people, we have done this before, you still fall into very similar chest because you sort of get addicted to the revenue. You don't want to have the hard conversation with customers and telling them, hey, you're sunsetting this, you're turning it off, you're vendor life ing it. These are, by the way, not fun, not easy conversations to have. But that's ultimately where you end up. So there were first two major product acquisitions. We did not integrate at first, but we ultimately did and we probably paid the price for it.

What is that price? Because you had this sort of near term of disappointing customers and risking the near term revenue. The price is long term. What is the cost?

It gets to a point. Yeah, you're managing multiple stacks, so it gets costly.

So you're adding on technical debt basically.

Yeah. You're having to like keep a team on some product. That's not the future. We call that waste. So waste is a piece of it. This product from Sheffield was built on a technology set that the rest of Pendo had no experience doing. So you had to keep engineers on it and just they couldn't scale. So that's the other problem is scaling in architecture. At that point, we had some decent sized customers. 2019, even if we go to 2020, when we're really in market selling it, we're selling very large businesses. And now this startup, which was not architected for very large businesses, their database started just like falling over. Now we're like scrambling to fix it. We're calling to apologize to the customer. We're now having to explain that it wasn't architected for scale. We're like, it's a Pendo product. All your other products are architected for scale. Why is this one not. It's a product of an acquisition and we didn't rewrite. So you have these conversations, which are really bad excuses for customers. And I'll never forget, there's a CEO actually, he's here. I'll quote him because I bring him in. It's Daniel from Greenhouse. Greenhouse. Great company as well. I'll never forget, he was doing it M and A. This is probably five years ago or so. And he was saying something to the effect of, people apply the expectations of your brand to this small company you just bought. And guess what? It's not your brand. It's a small company. It's very unfair. It's incredibly unfair. But that's the way customers think. And you slap your logo on it. That's the first thing you can do. You can always change out the logo. It became a Pendo product pretty fast, but then people expected to be a Pendo product and it wasn't. I mean, I guess it wasn't technicality because we owned it, but it wasn't architected originally by us. So that's an area where a lot of learnings in it.

What was the strategic driver for this receptive acquisition in 2019?

That one was an area where we do have called market maps or slides with different adjacent spaces. We're always asking ourselves, you look at our core buyer, what else are they using around us in conjunction with us? And one of our core Personas is a product manager, head of product. And nearly every product manager has to deal with customer feedback. There's been solutions for years around either having customers vote them up or subscribe to them, or collating by customers. But you want some way to manage customer feedback because it's painful. The thesis was all of our buyers have this problem in pain. All of them are going to need a solution in this area. Going to be a great part of our overall platform story. That was a thesis. We looked at a few companies. Yeah, it's a great one because again, I won't go into names, but there was another company that we looked at that felt like the more obvious choice. It was bigger, had more revenue. A lot of their team was actually in Raleigh, our hometown. How many tech companies are in Raleigh? It's not New York City or San Francisco. So the fact that they were there is like, whoa, this is like a match made in heaven. But no, we ended up buying a company in Sheffield, uk, another place I'd yet to ever visit in my life. Sometimes the most obvious decision isn't like the Right way. Wait, why though?

It doesn't seem like it was a product, but it was more of the culture of the team type of thing.

Bigger isn't always better. The company had a long history, a lot more complexity to it. Some of the customer contracts and situations were just I don't want to inherit it, I want something cleaner. They had some actually very large customers that I thought could have been Churn risks and you'll see us avoid buying something where I'm going to churn a bunch of their customers. In general, you don't want to buy Churn because one, you're probably paying for the revenue and then you're going to lose it or your team's scrambling to save it. So we tend to be much more careful around those situations. So this is a situation where bigger was not better, bigger were just more challenges. We opted to go with a simpler, lighter approach. While they weren't from our hometown of Raleigh, the founders, we really clicked with them. Good, scrappy, entrepreneurial people that were just passionate about what they're doing and just frankly really good people. Smaller is easier to consume. So it was like four or five person company. Yeah, it ended up being really just a good fit. And now to this day the Sheffield office is one where great office, great vibes and interestingly both founders have actually since departed. They stayed probably 4ish years. One's I think professor at a university and one I think is probably dabbling in some startups. But they left a culture that really still embodies this entrepreneurial spirit. Interesting fact post Covid. We were trying to get people back to the office and that team just without really any top down push, just started coming back every day. We want people in the office three days a week. At some point they were coming back five days a week. They just like being together. They liked being together, building together, collaborating, they liked talking about things. I mean you just feel this good vibes when you're in that office. Yeah, that's when you know it's a good acquisition.

When you say that you go through this exercise of market mapping, is it centered around here's your ICP or ideal customer and then it's map the universe of other products or things that they would do. Product leader example, is that how you look at it or is it more of just broad category segments?

Yes. I'm usually starting with our buyer, our Personas and what else they use on a day to day basis. If I'm trying to build a solution that's a single pane of glass For a role at a company. What other things do I need to have in that single pane? That's a big way about it. We build our own market maps. We don't really leverage any third parties or analysts. Sometimes our VCs will help us with diligence or looking at companies. Sometimes, but not always. Not always. We often like to do our own work. Now we have Obviously things like ChatGPT, deep research and things like that which actually pretty powerful for work like this. So that's a new part of our process. We just started using more recently. But yeah, that's kind of how we think about it. And look, I like to use these products. We have to play around with them. Would we use this product? Does it make sense to go with ours? That's always a good proxy.

The most recent acquisition since we're getting on the stories of all the deals you've done. Zelta, can you tell me a little bit about that one? What was the strategic driver there?

It's actually almost a continuation of receptive the Sheffield based acquisition. So that product started to bring us into it's more qualitative data about what people want in products. Specifically users are asking for these features now by the way, it's a great solution. But there are products requests and signals all over the enterprise. They're in support tickets, they're in call recordings for your go to market teams, they're all over the organization. The right solution, the right long term solution isn't just a form where people go and specifically ask. You should be harvesting this data from all these different systems. So that's kind of the backdrop of the problem domain. Large language models obviously are amazing at certain things. One of the things that they're very amazing at is looking at large quantities of text and pulling out certain insights based on prompts. They are amazing at it. What was a hard problem maybe be five years ago to ingest an entire company's Zendesk tickets and tell you what their customers want. With LLMs it becomes a much more practical solution. And we also realized we just didn't have people at Pendo that had huge LLMs for this application. So we went out and started looking for companies that can add this capability to our stack. Look, if the future of software and technology is going to be AI or agentic, it is going to be that's a pretty safe bet. A lot of smart people believe that we just didn't have all that skill set and experience on staff. And look, it's one thing for us to build up A prototype to do it. The bigger question there is how do you scale it? What are some of the challenges of this technology? There's this concept and I'm pretty confident in lean startup. Yes. In lean startup where they talk about validated learnings. A large part of my thesis around acquisitions is what are you paying for, especially if you're not paying for revenue. And by the way, most of these small companies, revenue multiples are never the ending deal price. Revenue multiples are companies like Pendo, like established companies that have been around for a while, that are pretty durable. There is no revenue multiple you can apply to a sub million dollar AR business. It's a strategic purchase. So the question is how do you think about valuing it? About what are the validated learnings? I'm buying, because that is what I'm buying. I'm buying validated learnings and maybe some customers, some tech and some human beings. That's sort of how I think about all this is that they've made a bunch of mistakes and if we buy this company, we will make different mistakes, but not those elementary ones. And that's worth it to me to make.

That's actually really interesting to you.

Yeah.

They already gone on this learning chart journey.

Exactly.

It's like a form of equity you're acquiring there.

Exactly.

Not have to go through that again.

Exactly.

That's actually really interesting. What about the just valuation where as soon as you slap AI to a.

Company, it's like I always joke, what's the right valuation of companies? Where do the two parties agree it is? That's really what it comes down to. It's really as most basic as that. The question is what are each party's alternatives? And each party won't share those alternatives because that would be bad negotiation. But it really comes down to what those alternatives are. When I think about AI companies, if you're a B2B AI company and you get to any level of product maturity, at some point you're probably thinking do I need to build a go to market team or not? That is what you're probably thinking. Because guess what, if it's a B2B company, you probably will need to build a go to market team. If you're a technical founder who's an AI expert, the question you have to ask yourself is do you want to build a go to market team? And some will, some will. I did. I'm a technical founder, I built a go to market team. Don't regret that decision at all. But if you just are really passionate about solving hard technical problems. Sales is kind of scary and don't want to go out and hire a bunch of people. By the way, the quickest way to burn capital is go out and hire a bunch of salespeople and have them not sell anything for a period of time. That will burn cash.

I learned that.

Yeah, we all learned that. So that's just the way the life works. So for those people who want to keep building really passionate around AI, we actually could be a really nice destination for them because you can build here. We've proven that we've kept people from previous acquisitions as builders and they get plenty of autonomy. And guess what, we have a huge go to market team. We have 150ish quota carrying reps, 150 global. You don't need to build that. You just take your product integrated in. Maybe a 3 build the backend to be in our data center. Which we did Zelta we. Zelta was one where again we did two mistakes. We were not gonna make a third. That would've been.

So you're a lot more proactive.

Oh yeah, we just stopped selling it. We fully wrote the backend in our data center. Like everything's totally native and fully integrated in. Then we launched it subsequently. That was the right call. I feel really good about it. And we're off to the races now. So now it's looking pretty awesome. There's no like hacking necessarily. Building a go to market team. Yeah, you can do plg but PLG just depend on the product domain and that's usually more B2C like use cases. But if you're B2B. Yeah, it's still a decision to make. Do I want to build this or do I want to not?

What are the structure of these deals that you put together? Is it there's always cash as a lever to pull earn outs if there's a valuation gap rollover equity. Have you found a combination that works?

Well, we tend to like equity based deals. We do have cash historically sometimes had cash part of the deal. It just depends on the situation but not a lot. So if cash is part of a deal it's very small and or tied to some sort of milestone or something like that. We've had conversations, we haven't actually transacted one where cash has been a more significant component. But actually I'll be candid. We had a very significant deal that I spent a lot of time on that ultimately didn't transact for that very very reason. I just couldn't see a world where we Load someone up on cash and they had any incentive to continue working. The question my board's going to ask me is how do you know they're locked in? How do you know they're going to stay there? You're going to acquire them. They show up and three weeks later they're peacing out, taking their money and starting the next thing. They're entrepreneurs, they like starting things. How do you know you're going to keep them there and retain them? So retention is something we spend a lot of time on in these deal constructs. What's going to keep them here and how do we know we're going to get a return on this investment? That's only what it comes down to. Are we going to get an ROI and can we retain people? Because there's a natural belief that if you're an entrepreneur, you won't want to be at a bigger company. As good as we are, as cool of a culture as much as autonomy. It is a bigger company. It is bigger. There are going to be some hoops to go through. You're going to buy something. We've got a professional procurement system that will take a few steps. You can't just go put on your credit card potentially and that'll piss off a few entrepreneurs. It has pissed off entrepreneurs. There's nothing I can do about that.

There's some trade off in transition for these incoming entrepreneurs. Regardless, you can't 100% paint the golden road for it.

So there's no magic in it. Look, earn outs, you need to be very carefully constructed. Simpler is always better. Shorter is always better. I have throughout my career seen games played with earnouts on both sides. I don't like games. I've done simple earnouts or just retention based bonuses. Be here for six months, one year, two years.

Show up and I'll pay you the vote.

I like those. I'll use those. The goal there is retention. But then where an earnout becomes more interesting is when there is a disconnect on the valuation of the business. And the disconnect is predicated on what maybe the seller thinks they're going to contribute to your business. Oh, we're going to contribute in future revenue, $10 million. Great. Okay. Are you willing to bank an earn out on it? Because I'm totally comfortable not holding you accountable to that number. But we're not going to gross up the deal to that either. So when you can't come to an alignment but you still want to proceed, earn out could be a way to bridge that gap.

There's some financial considerations to keep them in, be it earn out rolling over equity. It sounds like this is a big part of just thinking about unlocking value post close is you already talked about you like the product, you like the team, but keeping that team around, keeping them incentivized. You got some great examples where people continue to thrive post deal. Any other things that contribute to that, that you're making this a good transition for them to. This is to me like the magic because people don't think about this. And where deals go south is everything after close.

Yeah. So we start doing integration planning pre close. We have an internal owner of the integration, always pre close. Because three of the five acquisitions have been product level. We always have a team in the US assigned to help that technical team onboard. Because this is the other big failure pattern. We realized if you don't have a team on the core engineering team working with them, they don't know how to integrate in your product, they don't know your stack. It's not like you're hiring one person or two people or three people when you're putting them on existing teams. You're hiring teams of people and you're saying go at it. So we always have a team that is a shadow team or the integration team. The conduit between the core product architecture and the new product. That's something we've done in every single case. We're the kind of company I already mentioned discipline and cadence. We like running with some set number of either initiatives or OKRs on a quarterly and annual basis. So this integration always becomes an okr. So by definition that means regular check ins, specific key results and data being measured, readouts at every town hall, which is bi weekly. So we're going to bring a lot of visibility to it if it's an acquisition that's generally worked. The only thing we didn't talk about, we talked about all the product acquisitions. We did buy Community, which is kind of a different. Actually bought two communities.

I'd be interested to talk about that.

Yeah, it's pretty fascinating stories. As I said earlier, we started this concept of Community and the vision behind Community was I always thought one of our barriers to long term growth was the number of qualified product managers who could use our product. If there are an infinite number of product managers who use a product like Pendo, we'd have a much bigger tam. But the truth is there aren't. We need to go educate more. We need to help do the change management of teaching people how to be product Managers and long term, long term tam, we need more people that can take advantage and use our product in a meaningful way. And so we need to grow these people and we need to invest in these people. So community was a way to get people together, share best practices, educate others on how to leverage these sorts of technologies. It's particularly relevant for our business today. We work with now companies like traditional business like banks and retail companies and they're taking people who've been subject matter experts or business analysts, their companies for years and trying to teach them how to be product managers. And the cool thing is they're buying a lot of that education from Pendo now and we're actually helping partner with them to help transform their business. So it's not just that you buy product from us, we're also going to give you tools, certifications and training in.

Order to like, was that part of that? These community acquisitions, they already had certifications and things like that.

So yes and no. We had product craft. It was working, but it was small. We got approached by mine the product and they asked if we were interested. The way about that strategy is there's a great. It's part of one of the Jim Collins books. He talks about firing bullets before firing cannonballs. And that whole concept is run little experiments, see what work before you send the cannonball in. Product craft. All her other work was like little bullets. We knew it was working, but we wanted to go on the strategy. We bought Mind the Product. Mind the Product. Came with a ton of content, came with training, came with trainers. I came with multiple large conferences. So it's like taking what we're doing and growing it by 5, 10x. And also brought a whole team that were experts in doing that. Once we did that, we saw the opportunity to add the certifications and we challenged that team with creating the certifications. Then that's the team that formed all the certifications and that drove another level of growth for us within the community. So yeah, it's kind of all part of one strategy. The vision was it's pretty simple. We want the community to grow. Of course, if I had to think about from an ROI perspective, it is a lead gen engine for the companies. You do look at like the future of how you generate leads, specifically in a world of declining web traffic because of AI and other things. And you got to find other sources. That's creative. This group not only has large conferences, they also run meetups globally. So it gave us global reach. Just kind of think creatively about how do I grow my business and this felt like a pretty good alignment.

It's so true. This is the trend as a tech company. Need a media component to it.

Exactly.

We've seen the same thing firsthand. Web traffic, even paid ads, all declining. And this reason this podcast generates a lot of leads for our business. So it's absolutely true.

Yeah, you need to be creative. It's been a really good one. And then we doubled down on the strategy when we bought Product Collective, which was it a US based community. They ran the industry conference in Cleveland last year. And that was also, again, it comes down to people and talent. We've known the leaders of that for well over five years. We've been sponsoring that conference and we just really good humans and we thought they'd be great marrying with Mind the Product. And at the time we needed probably leadership for Mind the Product. So we acquired Product Collective. The leader of Product Collective now leads Mind the Product. So it's like one big happy team and we have now a pretty solid presence there and they're doing really great work. So that's an area where we're really happy with that strategy.

This is interesting because if you think about what you described for strategy icp, but now it's almost like you're flipping around to the go to market and this is a strategy of the go to market that you're actually accelerating with this community play. Because it's not in a traditional market map where here's all these.

That's not traditional market map. That is when we look at our business and look at what's special about Pendo, how do we differentiate? I've long said that we're more than just a software company. We want to help transform and change businesses. And if you're looking at some of these traditional companies, like the banks, like the other ones, they need our help in transforming. Step back. When I kind of described Pendo, the way I described it was like every company's becoming a software company. We need to help them, teach them how you run a software company and what roles you need. And that's part of this vision here. We realized early on that we needed to help companies transform. So it's all part of that strategy.

Yeah, you definitely help them optimize running a tech company. Basically.

Yeah, that's the vision.

I still don't get how you think through life mapping it.

Think of it this way. We'd already been doing this, but doing it at a smaller scale. We had a few people on it and we started modeling out what would make this attractive. For us, you start looking at the numbers and you start understanding what it would do for adjusting some of our essentially marketing programs, then also our international reach. When we made this acquisition, we were still primarily a North American business and they have meetups in, I don't know, probably 30 to 40 outside the United States. So it's also just trying to get more global reach.

Do you run independently or did you end up folding them in?

The brand is owned by Pendo, so we own it. Volunteers actually run the individual meetups in different cities. Dependable. We'll probably sponsor food at some of them. We'll send speakers to them. That's the other thing. If we have customers in regions that want professional development around speaking in front of audiences and other things, we now have a outlet that we can say, hey, would you like to speak at a meetup in your local community? We'd be happy to have you do the July meetup. Which is, it's a win, win for everyone. One, you get to hear this person's great insights. Two, they get good professional development and experience. Three, maybe they're recruiting for folks and they can meet people. I just think it's an ultimate win, win, win.

This has been good. I can tell you, coming from M and a background, I'm deal happy. We're at that stage you mentioned pretty early. We're about just under 50 people, 10 million ARR. I'm just like, want to go do a deal? Want to do a deal. But most of mine are drivers around revenue for some legacy tech that you got to take apart, try to migrate the customers over dealing with churn risk. Everything you just discussed is like, the driver is having this strategy for a brighter future as opposed to fixing crap. I feel like it's a good challenge for me. I think there's a little deal DNA coming from M and a advisory that you just want to do deals. And these are, oh, we can turn this thing profitable.

I want to do deals.

You're sticking to strategy. That's the thing.

That's.

I'll be honest, learning is easier said than done.

I am maybe not as much of a deal junkie as you, but I like doing deals. And look, I like doing customer deals too, so I'd probably prefer those over ma deals. But I like these things. I get excited by them. It's just my personality. I get excited about them. One of the interesting rubrics is but I have two co founders that are just very cynical people. So one of the things that the three of us can agree, we always feel better about doing a deal. And guess what? We've only agreed a handful of times, hence the number of deals we've actually done. But generally it's sort of easy to be a deal person. It feels like winning when you get something done. It does. It's gratifying. The other interesting fact is we've never had a corp dev person ever in the company history. So all these deals means that it's taking away from something in our day jobs and that is very time consuming. And we do look at a lot of things at any given time. We're probably looking at two to three things and not full time active in a real cycle. But we're having exploratory conversations. We're learning more. I never want to miss out on something and be like, why didn't we get the call on that? That's not fair. I've made a point. If you even read our press releases I've made been very, very clear in all the language that we are open for business. Call us if I'm going to be. We're open for business. I have to actually then answer the call and respond and engage. And so we do do that despite the fact we've only done a handful of deals. We'll look at a lot of things, we'll talk to a lot of people and we built good relationships through these things. There's a company we spent a lot of time with. It didn't end up working out. Boy, I like those people though. Good people. Could they be part of Pendo one day? Maybe you just never know. But I don't regret a minute I spent with that team because they're just such good human beings. And I learned something. But as you know, it's actually pretty hard to get deals done like you described.

You wanted to be rewarding at the end of the day when you get the deal done that you didn't put yourself out there. No corp dev team, you guys were just under 1,000 employees. No corp dev use bankers on your deals?

Never.

No, never.

No, we definitely don't. We have interacted with bankers on the other side. One very memorable process, but probably a couple others as well. But honestly, I've never enjoyed it. And why is that? The bankers are always trying to control the process and I guess it's their job. So they're being very cagey on what information is being shared. And I just think it's honestly, I know that they're trying to do a good job for their clients, but I never get raw with the Entrepreneur to understand who is this person? What are they all about? They never let me. I always get some shield and I like to know what I'm partnering up with. So I like to know who they are, what makes them tick. It's just a lot harder to get to the truth. So, yeah, it hasn't worked. I'm not opposed to it. I have friends that are bankers. Love you all. You're all great people, but it's been a little more challenging. Yeah, a little more challenging.

Yeah. The control of the timelines, just being able to work with that party, the element that you go through to build trust.

They also don't give you data. You get a lot more data from the company if they don't have a banker involved. Once a banker is involved, some analyst has to prove their worth by cleansing something or removing something or doing something. To me, when you have a lack of transparency just slows everything down. I have to go fast.

You got to be proactive. What's your approach to getting ahead of these opportunities before they turn into an auction process?

You always got to be meeting people and talking to people. I don't go to a ton of trade shows anymore, but I block time. I just got to walk the floor, try to talk to as many startups as I can. Obviously, I'm focusing on ones in our market or adjacencies, things like that, but I'm walking around and I get ideas all the time from that. That's helpful. But even on the Internet, I'll have entrepreneurs reach out to me. Hey, I want to chat. Even as someone who looks like a competitor, I'll take a meeting with anyone. And entrepreneurs who know me know I'll take a meeting with anyone. It may turn into something, it may not, but I'll certainly take the meeting.

Now.

I'm transparent. You can probably tell I am. Even on this podcast. I don't think there's much I'm going to share with some of these entrepreneurs. It's going to be dangerous for a panda or dangerous for them. At the end of the day, we all have to just execute.

I agree.

Execution is what separates winning and not. Yeah, I'm not going to divulge my entire pipeline to a competitor, but I'll share a roadmap. You could probably get it if you worked hard enough anyway. So I'm not going to hide anything that you couldn't get publicly. Anyway, for us, we do meet with a ton of people. I do it. My co, founder and chief product officer, he does it a ton. We're always meeting companies. You're just constantly meeting with companies. That's our job. Our job is to know the market.

Exactly.

You got to be experts.

Totally get that. You can't get around it. You got to go meet folks, understand the market, know who's who. When you get to that point, when you found something that's interesting that you could see potential in, how do you turn that actionable? Do you convince people to sell their business?

Yeah, of course.

Teach me how.

There's no magic.

I get the here's a better together story is what I'm concluding from.

First, I do believe it's got to be authentic. Just like when I sell a customer. Like, I authentically believe our product is going to be great for all of our customers, or I would probably lose a lot more than I don't like. I really believe it because I know it, because I've seen it, and I know that we're going to stand behind it. So I believe in this. And so when I talk to entrepreneurs, one, you go back to my past. Like, I've sold companies before to other companies. I've been part of M and A before. I've seen good and I've seen probably bad and ugly. Pendo treats its acquisitions really well. If you do reference checks on it. Oh, get people. Go talk to this entrepreneur, even if they're not here. I'm totally comfortable with you going and calling people. I have every confidence that I know what they're going to say, and it may not be all perfect, which I'm fine with. If people think any path is perfect, they're probably kidding themselves. And I'm like, look, if you want to go to battle with me and go win, let's go do this. That's what we're selling. We're selling that. I think we're selling our culture. One of the great things about joining a company like this is we do have a huge customer base that you could sell into immediately, and it's pretty attractive if you're an entrepreneur that's positive. I'd like to think that the people we're acquiring in maybe see me and some of the other members of our leadership teams as mentors and people that they can learn from. Some of the things I'll say to some of the entrepreneurs that join Pendas, look, I have no delusion this will be the last job you ever take in your life. It will not be, certainly depending on their age, but generally speaking, they will not be. So given this is probably not your last job. And you have a now history and track record of being an entrepreneur. How can you leverage your tenure here? Whatever you start next is just a little bit better, bigger, more significant. How can we get to the end of this tour of duty of you being at Pendo and you go start something and I write a check as an angel into it. I love to have that as the scenarios. I want to be an incubator for future startups and future entrepreneurs. So you bring entrepreneurs in, you help them build some more skills. Hopefully it's wildly successful for everyone and they go off and they do it again. And if they do that, I'm happy. I will not be upset. I will not go to you and try to force you to stay or what have you. I am totally cool with you coming in, contributing us, work together on this, and then you go out and do something else. That's kind of what I think is a pretty compelling story to an entrepreneur. And in a handful of cases, that gets worked.

No, it says it right there. That's truly fostering the entrepreneurial culture. It sounds like two big elements. There's the business case. Hey, we're going to grow better together in terms of business and revenue, more customers. But then there's the reputational culture component, which is why we're actually going to work well together. It seems like those are the two big elements to convince somebody to sell their company.

Yeah, a really proud moment for me happened earlier this year. We mentioned this Mind the Product community. We bought this. It was postcode 2021. And look, it was a very different as a community, it wasn't a software product company. So I will say of all the acquisitions, we had some changes in leadership. We had some folks depart, unfortunately. Then we acquired Product Collective. That team is now working collaboratively and now leading the product. And they just hosted their first big conference, their signature conference called Mind the Product, in London earlier this year. And I had several founders of Mind the Product walk up to me and just congratulate me on successful integration. Said the conference was great, as good as it could be. It felt culturally as it was before. The great news is we bought something, didn't fuck it up. Farmer language. I don't know if I could say that on your podcast, but knowing that we took something, it's bigger, it's still going well and it still maintained the essence of what it was. It says we're doing something right. We had a vision for how it could all integrate. It could both be Pendo and Mind the Products. And actually the thing that when it comes to culture. You don't actually want to eradicate a culture of a company you're acquiring. They'll feel sad and they'll be bad. You want to blend it and you want to enhance both cultures. We have generally done a good job on it. And you can see it in Sheffield, you can see it in Israel, and you can see it in mind the product. We've done a good job with that piece. That felt really good.

I got to ask you about these hidden nuggets that you discover post close. I feel like you go through this exercise, you find the opportunities, you build a business case and it's the financial picture. A lot of what you describe are very untangible things. You're using your brand, which now sudden customers have expectations around it. But then you found some gems and people that continue to thrive and accelerate and grow in roles. Can you talk to me about what are those hidden sort of golden nuggets that you discover post close?

It is really, really funny because you spend so much time when you're formulating a deal and your finance team's going to be involved a lot of spreadsheets on assumptions and Lyft and roi and this is why I'm willing to pay this much and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd be shocked if we hit any of those assumptions. Shocked. We are an optimistic bunch. I'm sure we've been wildly optimistic on a number of those things. We'd still rate pretty much all of them as a success. I don't know, we'd all mark them as A plus, but certainly B B pluses. And being good in M and A is hard. Most stats you hear is more than half fail. Ours have not failed. So I feel good about that. Look at the nuggets thing. It's how you approach these things. And maybe it comes back to this last story. I don't think we come into acquisitions saying, oh, we're big pendo. We know better than all you people. You got to do things our way. There's certain things that we know and we understand around our customer base that you probably should do. But we acquired you because we want to learn from you. We want to add you to our culture. We want something new and something different out of this event. Being curious and open minded and searching for positives at every juncture is great. I'd never been to Israel, I'd never been to Sheffield. And look, we had a lot of questions around Sheffield. How big of an office can we grow there? What's the overall Talent density look like in that region. If you told me to say Todd, I want open a remote office probably would not be in the top 100 companies that list, especially given I hadn't heard of it. But yet we're there. We've been pretty open minded over. Let's try to win. Okay, we're going to do this. Let's try to win. What do they need to win? We need to invest in certain town, we need certain people here. We need to do this sort of investment in hosting certain events. Real estate. A lot of the startups we acquire have pretty terrible offices. The last thing you want to do is they come to visit headquarters in Raleigh. It's like gorgeous. And then they go back to their town and they're like why is my office so sad? So we have upgraded everyone's real estate nearly right after, after the acquisition because we want them to be in a space that feels like Pendo. So our office experience team is part of these things. But that unlocks new ideas because then some offices do things slightly different because their culture was like this. That made come back into our culture. So being open minded and not trying to pink wash a company when you acquire them. Pinks are color folks so pink wash would just be coming in a little bit too. It looks good just like going in making them all exactly like us. We've done a pretty good job of not doing that. And because of it we've had little nuggets, little surprises, things that we weren't anticipating come as a byproduct of each and every one of these acquisitions.

Toddles sins mindset to unlock value, curiosity, open minded.

Yeah, that's not rocket science, but I guess it's worked for us.

It's a funny thing, it's common sense, but then we forget. We forget. So there's a deficiency of common sense.

Look, I can be arrogant. If you're buying something you want to sell this company, you're excited about it.

Oh, the story is here.

Treat them with respect. Yeah, I mean look, I was acquired early in my career by a company that was incredibly arrogant. I'm not going to name the company, but our company, this goes back a few years, was selling software downloadable on the Internet because not a shocking concept, but this was pre cloud. But this company had only ever sold software in physical boxes. The amount of time I spent with a team designing a box, designing a cd and then we could only ship this damn thing only so often because it's physical. Yet our whole business had been downloaded from the Internet. Guess what the world became only a few years ago. Everything was downloaded from the Internet, but they basically tried to stop us from doing it.

Wow.

It wasn't being open minded. It wasn't being curious. No. This is what we do. We do it this way. Even though it's patently stupid. Yes, we're going to do it that way. So I learned from that. We can learn something from these small companies. The AI one's a really good one, where this most recent one, they've been using AI more than we as a company had. This isn't just like building AI for our customers. They've been using it more. So they've been changing the way we develop software. Their sort of cto, I was in a meeting with him and a bunch of other engineering leadership and engineering leadership was saying, AI is bad at this, AI's bad at that. Can't handle this algorithm. And look, all correct. AI can generate cool prototypes, it can do things. But huge production code base and I don't think there's tons of use cases where it's working on massive production code base, at least not today. And who knows, it's changing every day, so maybe tomorrow there will be. But that's at least what we've seen. But the CTO was in this meeting and he said, well, hold on, I can spend two hours typing or 30 minutes reviewing what AI generated for me, what's actually faster? What's faster? It's the question that no one in the room was asking. But for a startup that didn't have teams of engineers like Pendo did, had to find a way to move faster. He had developed a process that was different than what our engineering team done because he was out of necessity. But imagine if we take that process and then have all of our engineers do it. Think of the amount of efficiency we're going to gain for our business. But that's something where you want that creativity and newness in your business.

That's what I'm talking about. This is unlocking that hidden value.

Yeah. Little details like that, they add up and they stack up and they are how we got here to today. These companies change us a little bit if you let them in good ways and it makes us all better for it.

What's the craziest thing you've seen in M and a?

In 2021, a lot of deals were getting bid up at exorbitant multiples and things were just literally nuts then. That's probably one of the craziest things I've seen.

I saw a 20x term sheet in that period. I don't know if you.

Oh, I think we put down probably a 25-30x term sheet. So I wasn't just dealing, I mean I was in the middle of it and then those were just really crazy times.

A lot of people underwater in their options, that's for sure.

Yeah, we were really hot on this one space. Really hot on this one space. We looked at a bunch of companies and these numbers were very large numbers. These were eight, nine figure deals. So these are not small, high multiples eight nine figure deals and we didn't transact one. So that's the long story. We ended up build, not buy and ended up being a really good decision. It's really funny, we spent so much time in the buy case and we were so just hell bent we're going to do this. We really hadn't spent much time in the build case. The deals fell apart because they were just frankly madness in terms of valuation madness. I just couldn't justify it. We backed out of both and it was also cultural. There's a million issues the reason we backed out, but they fell out, they fell apart. When we were left with what to do, we went back and challenged our teams and turns out that product, we had the skillsets in house. It was pretty adjacent to what we already do. Turns out we know how to build that kind of stuff really well. It's actually what our whole product does. It's a different use case, blah blah blah.

There's truth to that. There's times when organic can be more rewarding than doing an acquisition.

And then we launched that product and it's doing very well and contributed a good amount of revenue. And guess what, it's fully integrated into our core product because we built it that way from day one. So there's no integration that. I was talking to my wife about it who I confide in all sorts of things and she's like, aren't you going to pay nine figures for something like that? Aren't you glad you didn't do that? Yeah, that doesn't seem like a bad decision.

That's an old saying. Some of the best deals are the deals you don't do.

Yeah, but you'll never know. Yeah, you never know. We could have gotten some nugget from those that I didn't realize then. Yeah, I don't look at it quite like that. And look, even those companies I like, people spend a lot of time with them, really good people. So sometimes deals work, sometimes they don't. Well, they always say don't get attached to any one deal too much. That's probably really good. Thankfully, I don't think I do. Yeah, I want some of these things to work out, but you can't get too attached because there's a lot of factors.

This has been a great conversation. You've helped me become a much better M and A scientist today.

Hopefully. Well, hopefully there's something in there.

Those of you still listening all the way to the end, Fellow M and A Scientist, I appreciate you. Love hearing your thoughts on what you thought of this interview. Any feedback ideas for other topics I haven't covered? Reach out to me on LinkedIn. Until next time. Here's to the deal. Thank you for taking the time to explore the world of MA with our podcast. We love hearing feedback. Tag us on a LinkedIn post, add a review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear from you. If you need help standing up at M and A Function or optimizing one that you already have, we're here to help. And if we can't help you, we probably know someone that can. You can reach out to me by email Kisan K I S o n a science.com or you can text me directly at 312-857-3711. If you just want to keep learning at your own pace, visit mascience.com for a lot more content and resources. That's where you can also subscribe to our newsletter. Again, that's mascience.com here's to the deal. Views and opinions expressed on M and A Science reflect only those individuals and do not reflect the views of any company or entity mentioned or affiliated with any individual. This podcast is purely educational and is not intended to serve as a basis for any investment or financial decisions.