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Google Cloud, McDonald’s big tech acquisition, and motivating an engineering team

Our live conference call on Google Cloud Next Last week at its conference in San Francisco, Google Cloud unveiled a bevy of new features, and we also got to hear for the first time from its head honcho, Thomas Kurian . TechCrunch was on the scene, with enterprise editor Frederic Lardinois and enterprise reporter Ron […]
Our live conference call on Google Cloud Next

Last week at its conference in San Francisco, Google Cloud unveiled a bevy of new features, and we also got to hear for the first time from its head honcho, Thomas Kurian . TechCrunch was on the scene, with enterprise editor Frederic Lardinois and enterprise reporter Ron Miller covering all aspects of this major conference.

They conducted a live conference call with Extra Crunch members last week. In case you missed it, we’ve posted the transcript for members.

New Series: The Exit (this time with Dynamic Yield)

We talk a lot at Extra Crunch about starting companies up, but how do startups exit?

Lucas Matney, one of TechCrunch’s San Francisco-based writers, is developing a new series exploring why certain companies successfully exit. In this inaugural interview, he talks with venture capitalist Adam Fisher of Bessemer about his investment in Dynamic Yield, an adtech (but not really ad-based) startup that exited to (of all places) McDonald’s for a reported $300 million.

Lucas Matney: McDonald’s certainly seems like a bit of an unexpected buyer considering the early history of the company, but at what point in the company’s life cycle did it make sense that they would want to buy this tech? Or are you still a little surprised that this is the deal that went through?

Adam Fisher: Oh, yeah, with these kind of things you have to be skeptical until you see it in writing, and even then, skeptical. You know, as a VC, I’ve seen too many deals never mature to an offer, or even after the offer it’s pulled away. I mean, the less traditional the buyer, the more worried you have to be that something strange will happen, that somebody will change their mind, that somebody will get fired, that something unrelated will happen on the macro level.

So, you know, we were obviously skeptical until there was an offer.

But it was very clear, at a certain point, that the level of engagement was so high and so immense that they were serious, that this wasn’t just an idea that popped up after the had met Dynamic Yield, that they had been thinking about making such an acquisition for quite a while beforehand.

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