The Table · What is a big company actually buying when it buys you?
Every founder has a story about why the company matters. The acquirer has a spreadsheet, and the two rarely describe the same thing. Sometimes it is the product, sometimes the team, sometimes a data asset or a customer list nobody on the founding team thought of as the point.
It sounds like a question for year six. It is really a question for year one, because the choices that make a company worth buying, or impossible to integrate, are made long before anyone calls. We want to spend two hours on it with someone who has sat on every side of that table.
On the table
What an acquirer is really paying for, and which part of the company founders consistently overrate
The early decisions in architecture, data and customer mix that quietly decide whether you are acquirable
The day after: what survives the integration, and what it is like to run your product from inside the buyer
Our guest: Efi Cohen — co-founder and CTO of Datorama, acquired by Salesforce, and today an early-stage investor.
Efi was employee number one at Eyeblaster, later MediaMind, where as VP Technology he built the platform's architecture through a NASDAQ listing in 2010 and an acquisition a year later. In 2012 he co-founded Datorama, the marketing intelligence platform that pulled a marketer's scattered data into one picture, and in 2018 Salesforce bought it in a deal reported at more than $800 million. He then stayed on to head Salesforce's Israel R&D centre. He has lived an exit as an early employee, as a founder, from inside the buyer and now as an investor, which is about as complete a view of this question as exists.
Eight seats around one table in Tel Aviv: six people building in software and AI, our guest, and one person from StageOne. 13:00 to 15:00, two hours, one question. An open conversation with someone who has already done it, not a talk: no slides, no presentation, no pitching. Lunch is on StageOne.
Only six seats. Every seat changes the conversation, so if your plans change, please cancel your registration on this page or let us know as early as you can, and we will give the seat to someone else.
Seats are reviewed one by one. We send the exact address in the confirmation email.