M&A Science

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The Discount Is the Wrong Question in Private Equity Secondaries Aug 27, 2026

Show notes

Richard Chow, Partner at PJT Partners (NYSE: PJT)

Everyone asks the same first question in a secondaries deal: what's the discount. Richard Chow, a partner at PJT Partners who has sat on every side of this market as an LP, a buyer, a portfolio manager at Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, and now an advisor, says that question misses the point.

Chow traces how secondary market volume grew from roughly $10 billion a year in the early 2000s to more than $250 billion today, and lays out what a buyer should actually underwrite instead: the buyer's own cost of capital, how much upside is left in the asset, and where the proceeds go next. He also breaks down how managers mismarket IRR to retail investors using day-one discount math, and the SpaceX valuation call that taught him secondary buyers can rarely see past two years.

Chow's advice holds outside secondaries too: don't anchor a decision on one number and skip the strategic picture. DealRoom's Buyer-Led M&A™ framework gives corporate development teams a structured way to drive strategy, alignment, and value creation from day one instead of reacting deal by deal. See the five pillars: Link here.

How to Finance Acquisitions Without Giving Up Equity Aug 20, 2026

Show notes

Bill Stone, Founder and CEO of SS&C

How do you keep buying companies without eventually losing control of the company you built?

SS&C Technologies founder and CEO Bill Stone has spent four decades avoiding exactly that. Rather than treating each acquisition as an isolated transaction, SS&C built a system around protecting ownership, using debt when the economics make sense, paying it down quickly, and creating enough value after close to preserve capacity for the next deal.

Bill walks through the decisions behind acquisitions including FMC, GlobeOp, and Blue Prism, his experience taking SS&C private with Carlyle, and the discipline that has allowed the company to keep acquiring across changing markets.

What You'll Learn

How Bill Stone kept 15% of SS&C through 100 acquisitions
The exact revenue-per-head and EBITDA thresholds SS&C screens for
Why strategic buyers almost always outbid private equity
How to tell a motivated seller from one just fishing for a premium
When rollover equity can help retain the management team
How Carlyle overruled Stone's own unanimous board vote
The one rule that makes Stone walk from a deal every time

Every financing decision changes what you can do on the next deal. If you're financing an acquisition and don't have a hard leverage ceiling you actually stick to, DealPilot, powered by M&A Science, has the deal guidance layer to help you set one before you're over-levered on the next deal.

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This episode of M&A Science is presented by DealRoom.

DealRoom is the AI-powered operating system for Buyer-Led M&A™ — one connected system for pipeline, diligence, integration, and reporting. No tool-switching, no manual updates, no data gaps.

See how it works: https://hubs.ly/Q04mcGKy0

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Episode Chapters

[00:00] Intro and Guest Bio Check

[04:27] Protecting Ownership From Bankers

[07:32] Pivoting to the Buy Side

[12:12] Cutting a Client's Cost 91%

[12:32] Technology Cycles From Excel to AI

[15:14] First Acquisition and Going Public

[16:26] Balancing Investors and Founder Control

[20:08] The Carlyle Take-Private Story

[27:23] Screening Deals and Cutting Costs Fast

[32:02] Reading a Seller's True Motivation

[35:29] Winning FMC Under Canadian Rules

[42:10] Beating TPG for GlobeOp

[45:22] The Leverage Ceiling and Debt Paydown

[49:06] Topping Vista for Blue Prism

[53:17] Walking Away From a Lying Seller

[54:23] Diligence Speed and Trust But Verify

[54:58] Valuations and Capital Abundance

Where AI Actually Helps and Fails in M&A Legal Work Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

Aaron Binstock, Partner, Co-Head of Private Equity Practice at Cooley LLP

Aaron walks Kison Patel through where AI earns its keep in M&A legal work. It drafts well on a single provision, struggles with a full 80-page markup, catches defined-term errors, and benchmarks a repeat client's past deals. Its issues lists overreach, flagging who serves as independent accountant.

He shares his reverse prompt ("Is there anything else I can tell you?"), how Cooley handles clients who opt out of AI, and why diligence can now cover all 10,000 contracts instead of the top 100. Bottom line: AI owns nothing. The lawyer owns the result.

AI can pull change of control language out of a data room, but someone still checks every chart, and sellers want to know who sees their documents. DealRoom keeps diligence requests, documents, and permissions in one place. IVC Evidensia's result: review time cut from 30 minutes to 2. https://dealroom.net/case-studies/how-ivc-evidensia-executes-300-plus-roll-ups-per-year-with-dealroom?utm_source=libsyn&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=ep428-show-notes

The Back-Office Surprises Nobody Warned You About When Going Global Aug 06, 2026

Show notes

Jennifer Lipschultz, Sr. Director Merger & Acquisition Integration and Corporate Project Management

Due diligence said the target's employees were fluent in English. Six months after close, Jennifer Lipschultz was approving funding for business English classes.

Lipschultz, Senior Director of M&A Integration and Corporate Project Management at ECI Software Solutions, has run integration on 20-plus acquisitions across the Netherlands, Germany, India, and Sweden. She covers the back-office surprises standard diligence misses: English proficiency that doesn't carry over between acquisitions in the same country, a German go-live that required translating the website, support portal, and billing systems on the same day, and works council negotiations to harmonize benefits across entities. Every surprise means coordinating payroll, HR, IT, and legal on one timeline, deal after deal.

Lipschultz's point about herding payroll, HR, IT, and legal onto one timeline for every cross-border deal is the problem DealRoom Integration was built for: diligence findings and task owners carry straight into the integration plan, with dependencies that adjust automatically so one missed handoff doesn't blow the go-live date. DealRoom customers see a 50% reduction in people-hours per deal. See how it works: click here.

How to Structure an Acquihire Deal in the AI Talent Race Jul 29, 2026

Show notes

Derek Liu, M&A Partner at Baker McKenzie

Acquihires used to be priced at roughly a million dollars per engineer. Now buyers pay hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, for a team, and the old deal structures can't carry that weight.

Derek Liu, M&A Partner at Baker McKenzie, explains why tax leakage is pushing these deals back to stock purchases, so you inherit the whole company when you only wanted the people. Diligence flips with it: less time protecting IP, more time validating engineers before signing and planning how to exit what you don't need. He also covers why some acquirers now ask founders to revest 100% of their proceeds. "We're not paying you for what you've already built."

Derek's clients keep asking, "What's taking so long? All we want are the people." Part of the answer is wind-down diligence: which customer contracts you can exit, and which roles have to go before close. DealRoom Diligence lets you create, assign, and track every one of those requests in one workspace, built to "reduce your due diligence time by 50% by centralizing your diligence process." See how it works: click here

What Buyers Want from Bankers and Founders Jul 23, 2026

Show notes

Andrew Morbitzer, VP of Corporate Development, Life360 (ASX: 360)

Inbound deals have an "infinitesimally small chance" of landing on a buyer's shortlist of two or three targets. Andrew Morbitzer led more than $2 billion in acquisitions at Intuit and GoDaddy, worked the sell side as an advisor, and now runs corp dev at Life360 as a team of one.

He explains why most teasers bounce ("It's all about them. It's not about me.") and what earns meetings two, three, and four: a pitch tailored to each buyer, built from investor updates, earnings calls, and the CEO's own words on stage. He also walks through a deal, backed by a two-year founder relationship, that fell apart after a top-five bank sent a data-sheet teaser. The business was losing more money on every new customer.

His team spent seven days in raw data to find that, and Andrew says AI with access to the data would find it in minutes. DealRoom MCP connects Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini to your live deal data, so your AI can analyze diligence documents and write findings back with source citations. See how it works: click here

220 Deals. One Playbook. How to Scale M&A Without Losing Control Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

Shawn Rodricks, Head of M&A - Independent Consultant

"I can be the best corp dev individual in the world. I get my integrations wrong, I've lost the transaction." Shawn Rodricks learned that in year one at Amerivet Veterinary Partners, when he rushed integration on a late deal, left the banking with the seller, and the funds became hard to track.

Shawn has closed about 220 acquisitions across Rexall and Amerivet, at times three to five a week. He breaks down the operating model behind that pace: a cross-department playbook that names the task, owner, and timeline for every stage, a closing-week SWAT team for when deals stack up, a probability-weighted pipeline that tells finance when to fund, and a clear line between what must be integrated before close and what can wait.

Shawn's rule is that a playbook has to "live and breathe with every transaction." IVC Evidensia, a veterinary roll-up running repeatable diligence processes and centralized deal tracking in DealRoom, completed 56 deals in a single month. See how they run it: click here

How to Build a Deal Model That Beats PE on Price Jul 09, 2026

Show notes

Jeremy Segal, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development, Progress (NASDAQ: PRGS)

Progress beat several reputable PE firms for Chef without paying more. The edge was a cost model PE couldn't copy: Chef's expensive engineers moved to Progress's Bangalore center of excellence, and its field sales team shifted to an inside sales motion.

Jeremy Segal has done close to 50 acquisitions over 25-plus years. He breaks down how Progress models cost synergies before LOI using only what it can execute with high confidence. He explains why Progress won't retrade after signing unless the numbers prove materially different, and the "orange flag" system that sends diligence friction straight to the CEO and CFO. He also covers the ShareFile carve-out, retention when a target's IPO hopes fall through, and why private valuations still haven't caught up to public markets.

Jeremy's first orange flag is basic information requests that sit unanswered for two or three weeks. DealRoom Diligence tracks every request, owner, and deadline for your team and the seller in one place, with automated status alerts, so a stalled request shows up long before week three. See how it works: click here

The People You Lose in M&A: Key Talent Retention Before Close Jul 02, 2026

Show notes

Haseeb Jawad, VP and Head of Corporate Development, Commvault (NASDAQ: CVLT)

Most acquirers build retention around the bonus. Haseeb Jawad puts money third. His order is heart, brain, then pocket: win people through your actions from Day 1, convince them with a better-together story you actually believe, then get the financial package right. Even that can backfire. He shares how a delayed retention payment, caught up in payroll processing, undercut the goodwill his team had built.

Haseeb runs a lean corp dev team at Commvault that owns deals from sourcing through integration, and he leads the IMO himself. That keeps the business case honest: if he models an IT or headcount synergy, he has to deliver it. He also makes the case for employee-by-employee diligence after LOI instead of treating people as an Excel line item.

Haseeb's rule is that every business case assumption needs an operational plan behind it. DealRoom's Synergy Tracker is built for that: define each synergy, tie it to an owner, a value, and a date, and link it to the integration plan so you can track what gets realized after close. Click here to learn more.

How to Buy Companies That Aren't Profitable Yet Jun 25, 2026

Show notes

Matt Arsenault, VP of Corporate Development & Strategic Alliances at Jamf

"A $25 million M&A deal today can be just as valuable to a founding team as a $125 million deal three years from now." Matt Arsenault has run that math with enough founders to know it changes deals.

Matt walks Kison through how VCs price a company on the management team and the size of the disruption opportunity, and why AI wrapper startups are now valued as acqui-hires. He shows how a liquidation preference turns a "$100 million" company into a $21 million payout for the founders. Then he lays out how to close a valuation gap: build the founder relationship before the fundraise, map the seven or eight stakeholders in every deal, and match retention, earnouts, and deferred payments to the right group.

Matt keeps scheduled check-ins with investors in the spaces Jamf targets, so the hard conversation never starts cold. His team runs Jamf's M&A process in DealRoom, from pipeline through integration, and cut deal time in half. See how Jamf does it: Click here.

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