Canva avoids a delegated M&A team. The COO personally sponsors acquisitions, focusing on the acquired founder's motivations and cultural fit—often assessed over a drink. This deeply personal approach ensures the founder's vision aligns with Canva's distribution power, leading to successful integrations and high founder retention.

Large companies rarely make cold acquisition offers. The typical path is a gradual process starting with a partnership or a small investment. This allows the acquirer to conduct due diligence from the inside, understand the startup's value, and build relationships before escalating to a full buyout.

Dollar Shave Club's $1B sale to Unilever wasn't a formal M&A process. It began with a simple dinner where Michael Dubin and a Unilever executive discussed business goals. This shows major strategic exits can originate from informal networking and relationship-building, not just boardroom meetings.

A successful exit is a highly choreographed dance, not an abrupt decision. Founders should spend years building relationships with line-of-business leaders—not just Corp Dev—at potential acquiring companies. The goal is to 'incept' the idea of an acquisition long before it's needed.

For proactive deal sourcing, the initial contact is a high-stakes sales call. F5's Andy Cohen invests 2-10 hours researching a target before the first outreach. This deep dive into podcasts, blog posts, and mutual connections enables a substantive, flattering conversation that builds immediate rapport and credibility.

When asked about acquisition targets, Versant's CEO indicated the company is looking at newsletter and podcasting businesses whose personalities are already frequent guests on networks like MSNBC. This suggests a 'try before you buy' M&A approach, where on-air appearances serve as a vetting process for potential acquisitions.

A marketing agency acquired its industry's largest trade publication not to become a publisher, but to create a powerful lead generation engine. Owning the trusted media source for his target clients (real estate agents) provided an unmatched top-of-funnel strategy, driving high-quality leads directly to his agency.

When a potential acquirer calls, the founder's default mode should be information gathering, not pitching. By asking strategic questions ("Who else are you talking to?", "What are your goals?"), founders can extract valuable competitive intelligence about the market and the larger company’s plans, regardless of whether a deal happens.

TA's extensive deal sourcing operation, which contacts 40,000 businesses annually, isn't just for new platform investments. The firm systematically identifies smaller companies within this funnel that are perfect add-on acquisitions for its existing portfolio companies, creating a proprietary M&A pipeline that has resulted in over 1,500 deals.