Episode 27: Special—A Conversation with Microsoft's Head of Strategic Investments Brian Schultz

Topics covered include: Brian’s history working across “both sides of the aisle” as both a startup founder and corporate development leader at a big company, how perspective from each informs the other, and the importance of learning “customer empathy” How Microsoft approaches M&A from an organizational perspective, and the importance of fit with the company’s product roadmap How Brian approaches strategic investments at Microsoft, and the evolution over time of the Microsoft (and large technology companies as a whole) perspective on investing in other companies Balancing the tension between partnering and investing, and what criteria Brian thinks about when evaluating companies Microsoft’s investment in Facebook in 2007 (at a then-crazy-seeming $15B valuation), and more recently Foursquare , Mesosphere , CloudFlare and others The current state of the tech M&A landscape, and the emergence of private equity as tech company acquirers Potentially changing corporate and foreign tax structures and how they impact acquirers’ thinking around deals (or not!) How Microsoft tracks and evaluates success of acquisitions over time, and lessons learned from successes and failures The increasing number of operating companies (technology and otherwise) looking to invest in startups, and how that landscape has evolved over time Sponsors: Sierra: https://bit.ly/acquiredsierra Sentry: https://bit.ly/acquiredsentry Anthropic: https://bit.ly/acquiredclaude25 Vanta: https://vanta.com/acquired Followups: Snap Inc.’s rumored IPO filing — and bonus discussion of how VC’s and other investors think about “exiting” their investments in companies that have gone public Hot Takes: Amazon Go! The Carve Out: Ben: OK Go - The One Moment David: UC Berkeley Oral History with Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine Brian: Om Malik’s recent piece in the New Yorker: Silicon Valley Has an Empathy Vacuum More Acquired! Get email updates with hints on next episode and follow-ups from recent episodes Join the Slack Subscribe to ACQ2 Merch Store ! © Copyright 2015-2025 ACQ, LLC