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How to get in front of acquirers, Russ Heddleston CEO at Distill - The Startup CEO SHOW

23 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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Excerpt from a video interview with Russ Heddleston (CEO, Distill) about strategies for getting in front of corporate acquirers. Heddleston says cold outreach (emails or LinkedIn) can work because corporate development people monitor market activity, but introductions are generally better. He notes credibility from educational and professional background (Stanford undergrad/grad, Harvard business club) helped him gain connections.

Chapters

Now, you knew Drew from before, but were you literally just cold contacting other people? Generally not, although it has happened for me. Like cold emailing a corp dev person or just like, you know, adding them on LinkedIn and they'll respond because their job is to kind of know what's going on in the market. So it's often not like terribly hard to go get on the corp dev person's radar if you know what you're doing. Seems relevant if what you seem credible as a team type of thing. But no, generally asking for introductions is the best way. It was also like for me, I'd already have a pretty good background Stanford for undergrad and grad in computer science as a business club at Harvard. And so I was able to get some connection.