The really critical point I'd like to highlight is this one:
> Marin’s team sent over a list of hundreds of technical, legal, and business questions that we’d need to answer for the deal to go through...Tracking down document after document was tedious beyond compare.
Having your ducks in a row as much as possible can make a huge difference in the complexity, risk, and overall stress of doing a sale/acquisition.
I don't mean Day 1, of course, but once you're starting to have conversations around acquisitions, it's really helpful to make sure your books are clean, that you have clearly documented your software stack, all of the third-party code you use and licenses, all of the contracts and MSAs you might have signed iwth your customers, employment agreements with contractors, and so on.
It's annoying, but once you have it done it's relatively easy to keep up to date.
When we sold our last startup, our CFO had done this 10+ times before, and on the first day of the due diligence, he handed over a URL for a data room with hundreds of documents, categorized and neatly organized. The acquirer's lawyers said it was the easiest DD they'd ever seen.
EDIT: I sentence misplaced words in a
> Marin’s team sent over a list of hundreds of technical, legal, and business questions that we’d need to answer for the deal to go through...Tracking down document after document was tedious beyond compare.
Having your ducks in a row as much as possible can make a huge difference in the complexity, risk, and overall stress of doing a sale/acquisition.
I don't mean Day 1, of course, but once you're starting to have conversations around acquisitions, it's really helpful to make sure your books are clean, that you have clearly documented your software stack, all of the third-party code you use and licenses, all of the contracts and MSAs you might have signed iwth your customers, employment agreements with contractors, and so on.
It's annoying, but once you have it done it's relatively easy to keep up to date.
When we sold our last startup, our CFO had done this 10+ times before, and on the first day of the due diligence, he handed over a URL for a data room with hundreds of documents, categorized and neatly organized. The acquirer's lawyers said it was the easiest DD they'd ever seen.
EDIT: I sentence misplaced words in a