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:

• WorkOS: https://bit.ly/workos25
• Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra
• Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry
• Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25

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:

• Amazon Go!

The Carve Out:

• Ben: OK Go - The One Moment
• David: UC Berkeley Oral History with Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine
• Brian: Om Malik’s recent piece in the New Yorker: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum

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