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
• Intapp: https://bit.ly/intappceleste
• 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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