20VC: Are IPO Windows Shut? Has Regulation Killed the M&A Market? M&A OG Frank Quattrone on Lessons from 650 M&A Deals Worth Over $1TRN and Taking Amazon, Cisco and Netscape Public

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The Twenty Minute VC

Finance, Venturecapital, Tech News, News, Siliconvalley, Technology, Investing, Startups, Business

4.4 • 637 Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frank Quattrone is the Founder and Executive Chairman of Qatalyst and served as its CEO from the Firm’s founding until January 2016. Over more than four decades, Frank and the teams he has led have advised on more than 600 mergers and acquisitions with an aggregate transaction value over $1 trillion and on more than 350 financings that raised over $65 billion for technology companies worldwide. Frank led the IPOs of Amazon.com, Cisco, Intuit, Netscape, among many others. He advised Apple on its $400 MM acquisition of NeXT (which led to Steve Jobs’ return to Apple); Concur on its $8.3B sale to SAP; LinkedIn on its $28.1B sale to Microsoft; Qualtrics on its $8B sale to SAP and Twitch on its $1B sale to Amazon.com.

In Today's Episode with Frank Quattrone:

1. Has Regulation Killed M&A:

Why does Frank disagree that regulation has killed M&A?
What is the real reason why M&A is so down at present?
What would impact would a Trump administration have on the M&A environment?
What are some of Frank's biggest lessons from 600 prior transactions over dour decades of what happens when an M&A market shuts down?

2. When Will the IPO Window Re-Open:

Does Frank agree that the IPO window is currently closed for tech companies?
How does this IPO window compare to the dot com bust and 2007?
What is needed for the IPO window to re-open?
What is the timeline that Frank puts on the IPO window opening again?

3. M&A: How Do Companies Get Bought:

What is the process for a company to be bought?
What are the single biggest mistakes the seller makes in the process?
What do the best buyers and sellers do to get the best price?
Does Frank agree with the notion that "companies are bought and not sold"?

4. IPOing Amazing, Selling Linkedin and Qualtrics:

What is the story behind, Frank, Bill Gurley, Jeff Bezos and John Doerr pricing the Amazon IPO?
How did Linkedin come to be bought by Microsoft? What did that process look like?
How did Frank structure an event to ensure that Ryan @ Qualtrics and Bill McDermot @ SAP would meet and lead to the acquisiiton?

Transcript

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0:00.0	It's not necessarily regulation that's killing it.
0:02.9	The worst M&A years we've had, ironically, are when there's been a market crash.
0:08.6	Sellers still think that they're worth what they were worth last year, and it's hard for them
0:12.9	to imagine that they're not worth 20 times revenues.
0:15.7	They're really worth eight.
0:16.9	And it takes a while for that to sink in.
0:19.7	Trump is not a classic free markets Republican. He
0:22.5	doesn't like big tech. So I don't think we're going to see much of a difference in the antitrust
0:28.2	environment. This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I've been very vocal about my concerns
0:32.9	surrounding the closed IPO markets and the regulatory barriers that are really preventing a lot of acquisitions from taking place.
0:39.3	And I wanted to really focus on this today and invite an OG of the acquisition space onto the show.
0:45.3	With that in mind, it was very clear who I wanted to invite.
0:48.3	He's advised on more than 600 transactions over four decades with an aggregate transaction value of over a trillion
0:56.1	dollars. He's become the OG of the space leading IPOs for Amazon, Intuit and Netscape,
1:01.5	to name a few. With that, I'm so thrilled to welcome Frank Quatron, co-founder and executive
1:05.9	chairman at Catalyst to the show today. But before we dive into the show today,
1:09.7	Merges the leading product
1:11.4	integration platform offering a suite of unified APIs across key software categories from
1:16.8	HRIAS to CRM. That allows organisations to offer hundreds of customer-facing integrations.
1:23.2	Merge also handles the full integration lifecycle from an easy initial build to handheld end user
1:29.3	onboarding to maintenance support and management tooling for all your integrations.
1:33.3	Thousands of customers like Ram, Gong, Semgreb and Sendoso use Merge to power their integrations.
	...

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