Ganesan warned that assuming a large strategic acquirer will buy a company at the preferred stack is a dangerous downside-protection thesis. Listen
Ganesan noted current large deals, such as AMD's $8.5B acquisition and Nvidia buying Hugging Face for $14B, and compared them to the dot-com era, when acquirers such as Lucent paid billions in stock for product-less teams (Lucent paid $4.5B for Chromatis). He said that thesis 'didn't quite work out' after March 2000. He also noted that acquirers have no reason to protect investors and can hire founders through structured deals that leave investors out.
“I just wouldn't take the mindset, oh, some large strategy is going to buy my company for the preference stack because they don't care about the investors.”
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