1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures (Part 1)

Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures, and formerly Head of Corp Dev at Twitter, SuccessFactors, and McAfee and Akamai discusses exit strategy from the buy-side perspective at length.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by having you talk a little bit about your background in corp dev doing acquisitions from the buy side from various significant companies before you switched to the venture side.

Seksom Suriyapa: I’ve now had four stints as a corp dev leader. I’ve been at Twitter, SuccessFactors, Akamai, and McAfee. Hearing that list, you can appreciate that it’s an unusual list to string together because they really reflect from the very bottom of the stack to the top of the stack. What’s most notable about the times I spent is, I’ve been lucky to be with companies at important strategic inflection points.

I joined SuccessFactors when it was a one-product company. I had the opportunity to build out the product suite with the product leadership team which them led to the sale of SAP. It was then the highest software multiple of all time. Then more recently at Twitter, I had been part of a team that was in place to accelerate the pace of innovation.

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I can get a synthesis of how you think about acquisition – what to acquire and why. You just cited two different motivations. Explain how you acquire and why. I’m going to focus on the buy side in the interest of time. Let’s talk about what you acquire. We work primarily with early-stage companies. We love capital-efficient companies. In that spectrum, how do you think of acquisitions both on the B2B and B2C side?

Seksom Suriyapa: As a corporate acquirer, what’s really key is knowing where your company is headed. Strategy comes first which is defining where the company is headed. In the example of SuccessFactors, it was going to build a product suite. What is the product suite? In what order do you stack and rank a product suite? The second piece around acquisitions is once you know where you’re headed.

You have to bear in mind that it’s really one of three ways to get to the goal of executing a strategy. There’s internal build. There’s often an opportunity to OEM and then there’s acquisition. Part of my job was not always to find a deal and do an acquisition. It’s to force the company to think through the three alternatives and then determine that acquisition is the best way to accomplish that.

Sramana Mitra: What you’re saying is very interesting. Do you view OEM as a stepping stone to an acquisition?

Seksom Suriyapa: Yes, it can often be. Twitter has been relatively private about how it talks about itself. As an example, we were looking at spam filtering at Twitter. We bought a company in that space. It was an acquihire and minimally-capitalized. Before the acquisition, we ended up OEM’ing the product. From OEM’ing, it very quickly moved to acquisition. It’s definitely a path. Companies often tend to go between buy or build. That middle zone can sometimes be the right answer.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Seksom Suriyapa, Partner at Upfront Ventures
1 2 3 4