Corporate Development (Software Industry)

There are plenty of junior and senior M&A folks who have a "we'll buy these companies and put them together to save money" approach. I refer to this as a consolidation approach. It's not a bad approach. Especially if you purchase older software companies with sizable revenue streams. But this approach to M&A doesn't excite me.

How boring.

Me—I'm into revolutions. That's what got me into the software industry in the first place.

I'm on my fifth or sixth revolution now. Where the new guard beat the old guard and the old guard is left scratching their heads wondering what happened. It happened when I picked Unix (over proprietary operating systems), it happened to me with relational databases (which I chose over less rigid file sytems) and it happened to me with my believe in mobile.

My best "pick" over the last 15 years or so was MySQL. Joe Alsop, from Progress Software, gave me unlimited time and budget to go pick the "next big thing". I shook down many segments of the industry. One by one. And I travelled near and far. Within six months I picked a winner. MySQL. Three guys out of Finland and Sweden. Joe got very excited. But he just couldn't bring himself to invest. A few years later they sold for a billion dollars in a competitive bidding war. That's one of my favourite things to do. Find the revolution.