In reading Matt’s account of the Google look-see at Olive Software I was reminded of a conversation I had pretty recently with a VC friend. Apparently, it’s becoming rather common to have the “deal team” at Google scour the landscape and do a lot of due diligence only to have their deal pitches rejected by senior management because of any range of product or technology issues. This wouldn’t necessarily be all that out of the ordinary were it not for the fact that “someone from the senior team meets some startup founder or investor at a party, scribbles the name of a company on a scrap of paper and then sends it to the deal team with a ‘buy this company’ comment on it”.
It all seemed like a ‘go,’ but then the Google team suddenly decided the product didn’t have everything they wanted. So why, one person close to the deal asked, did Google invest so much time and effort into the people, when it turns out they hadn’t fully checked out the product first?
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