Episode 27: Special—A Conversation with Microsoft's Head of Strategic Investments Brian Schultz
Acquired16 Joulu 2016

Episode 27: Special—A Conversation with Microsoft's Head of Strategic Investments Brian Schultz

Topics covered include:

  • Brian’s history working across “both sides of the aisle” as both a startup founder and corporate development leader at a big company, how perspective from each informs the other, and the importance of learning “customer empathy”
  • How Microsoft approaches M&A from an organizational perspective, and the importance of fit with the company’s product roadmap
  • How Brian approaches strategic investments at Microsoft, and the evolution over time of the Microsoft (and large technology companies as a whole) perspective on investing in other companies
  • Balancing the tension between partnering and investing, and what criteria Brian thinks about when evaluating companies
  • Microsoft’s investment in Facebook in 2007 (at a then-crazy-seeming $15B valuation), and more recently Foursquare, Mesosphere, CloudFlare and others
  • The current state of the tech M&A landscape, and the emergence of private equity as tech company acquirers
  • Potentially changing corporate and foreign tax structures and how they impact acquirers’ thinking around deals (or not!)
  • How Microsoft tracks and evaluates success of acquisitions over time, and lessons learned from successes and failures
  • The increasing number of operating companies (technology and otherwise) looking to invest in startups, and how that landscape has evolved over time

Sponsors:


Followups:

  • Snap Inc.’s rumored IPO filing — and bonus discussion of how VC’s and other investors think about “exiting” their investments in companies that have gone public

Hot Takes:

The Carve Out:


More Acquired!

© Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC

Jaksot(212)

The NFL (2026 Update)

The NFL (2026 Update)

The NFL is nearly synonymous with America today. Practically nothing is more quintessentially and universally American than tuning in every Sunday (and Monday, and Thursday… and sometimes Saturdays an...

27 Tammi 4h 17min

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)

Why has Acquired — seemingly against all odds — “worked”? It's a puzzling question: episodes are four hours long, they come out infrequently, and they usually don’t have guests or video. Hardly the st...

15 Joulu 20252h 47min

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola is… sugar water. And somehow it’s also America, Christmas, summertime, friendship and happiness. Today we tell the story of how The Coca-Cola Company amazingly transmogrified a beverage into...

24 Marras 20254h 4min

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe’s

Trader Joe's breaks every rule of modern retail. They don't do e-commerce. They don't do delivery. No sales, coupons, or loyalty programs. They only stock 4,000 SKUs versus 50,000+ at normal supermark...

27 Loka 20253h 28min

Google: The AI Company

Google: The AI Company

Google faces the greatest innovator's dilemma in history. They invented the Transformer — the breakthrough technology powering every modern AI system from ChatGPT to Claude (and, of course, Gemini). T...

6 Loka 20254h 6min

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

Acquired Live at Radio City Music Hall (Presented by J.P. Morgan)

It’s finally here! Today we are releasing Acquired’s first “concert film” — the full video recording of our Radio City live show from this summer with Jamie Dimon, Andrew Ross Sorkin, New York Times C...

1 Loka 20251min

Alphabet Inc.

Alphabet Inc.

In its first six years from 1998 to 2004, Google built one of the greatest products of all time (and certainly the greatest business of all time) with Search. Then in its next six years from 2005 to 2...

26 Elo 20254h 11min

The Jamie Dimon Interview

The Jamie Dimon Interview

We sit down with Jamie Dimon for a live conversation at Radio City Music Hall, covering the incredible journey from his 1998 firing at Citgroup (where he was widely expected to become CEO) to building...

16 Heinä 20251h 8min

Suosittua kategoriassa Liike-elämä ja talous

sijotuskasti
mimmit-sijoittaa
psykopodiaa-podcast
rss-rahapodi
pomojen-suusta
ostan-asuntoja-podcast
rss-rahamania
rss-draivi
herrasmieshakkerit
rss-myyntikoulu
rss-sami-miettinen-neuvottelija
rahapuhetta
inderespodi
salkunrakentaja-podi
juristipodi
rss-lahtijat
rss-bisnesta-bebeja
rss-seuraava-potilas
rss-set-for-life-sijoita-ja-vaurastu
rss-rahataito-podcast