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Acquired

Episode 21: Inside the M&A Press with Bloomberg's Alex Sherman

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 September 2016

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Ben and David go inside the M&A press with Bloomberg’s technology M&A reporter and host of the Deal of the Week Podcast, Alex Sherman. If you’ve ever wondered how stories about big deals get broken or what “according to people familiar with the matter” really means, tune in for the behind-the-scenes scoop! Note: A technical glitch with our recording setup created occasional short silences between Alex’s comments and Ben & David’s. It shouldn’t impact listenability, but we apologize for the awkward pauses!

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury


Topics covered include:
  • Bloomberg’s own fascinating “history & facts” and origins following the acquisition of storied Wall Street firm Salomon Brothers
  • Bloomberg’s core as a highly profitable technology business (selling terminals to Wall Street firms), with a large media empire built on top of it
  • The tradable value of breaking M&A news & information to Bloomberg’s terminal customers, and competing on speed
  • How “sources" work — and industry standard that sources be directly within the companies involved in a deal
  • The coded language of M&A reporting and gleaning where information is coming from based on a story’s structure and phrasing
  • The lifecycle of a story—steps from sourcing to writing to release, and reasons (or lack thereof) for why stories run when they do
  • Internal & external PR resources companies use for M&A
  • How Alex prioritizes his time researching and creating stories, and who he’s meeting with to hear about what deals are in the works
  • The difference between ‘news' and ‘analysis', and why news dominates the majority of stories versus deeper analysis
  • Media and social media business models, their evolution in the messenger world, and speculation on Twitter’s future
  • How entrepreneurs can think about interacting with the press and building relationships with the right reporters for their stage and space
  • Apple’s ‘unique’ approach to press relations

Followups:

Hot Takes:

The Carve Out:

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

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0:17.9

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0:21.4

platform as you hit hyper growth and scale into a larger enterprise.

0:26.9

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0:27.9

When we first started working with Vanta and met Christina, my gosh, I've had like a couple

0:31.6

hundred customers, maybe.

0:33.7

Now they've got 5,000, some of the largest companies out there, it's awesome.

0:38.3

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0:45.2

past you showed Vanta to your compliance department you might have heard something like, oh well we've already got a compliance

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process in place and we can't integrate this new thing.

0:53.0

But now, even if you already have a sock to,

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Vanta makes maintaining your compliance even more efficient and robust.

1:00.0

They launched vendor risk management.

1:02.0

This allows your company to quickly understand the they launched vendor risk management.

1:02.6

This allows your company to quickly understand the security posture of the vendors

1:06.9

that you're choosing in a standardized way that cuts down on security review times.

1:11.3

This is great.

1:12.0

And then on the customization front they now also

1:14.4

enable custom frameworks built around your controls and policies. Of course that's

...

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