Are You A CEO Or Senior Executive That Is Determined To Succeed In The New Economy By Partnering With, Investing In Or Acquiring A Technology Company?
What is your biggest challenge to leading your company into the digital world?
In This Breakthrough Book For Senior Executives, You’ll Discover:
- The keys to transforming your company into a digital industry leader
- How the right acquisitions and partnerships with tech companies will transform your entire ecosystem
- Strategies to deploy the new levers of shareholder value creation
- Methodologies and tactics to investing in the right tech companies by minimising risk and optimising reward
- How to leapfrog your competition in one bold move
- Strategies to finally take the market share that your company deserves
- The keys to transforming your company into a digital industry leader
- How the right acquisitions and partnerships with tech companies will transform your entire ecosystem
- Strategies to deploy the new levers of shareholder value creation
- Methodologies and tactics to investing in the right tech companies by minimising risk and optimising reward
- How to leapfrog your competition in one bold move
- Strategies to finally take the market share that your company deserves
It's Happening In Your Industry, To You And All Of Your Competitors
In Go Tech, or Go Extinct: How Acquiring Tech Disruptors Is the Key to Survival and Growth for Established Companies, Paul Cuatrecasas shares his revolutionary approach to transforming legacy companies into forward-thinking industry leaders through the strategic acquisition of disruptive technology companies. As the founder and CEO of Aquaa Partners, Cuatrecasas has facilitated more than forty-five global merger and acquisition transactions involving technology companies and ranging in size from $1 million to $1.5 billion.
Leveraging insights gained from his one-on-one meetings with C-suite executives of over 300 large corporations during 2018 and 2019, Cuatrecasas explains why so many corporates are failing at innovation and why technology companies represent the new secret formula for non-tech corporate incumbents to delight their customers and leave their competition in the dust.
Go Tech, or Go Extinct is an insider’s guide to the opportunities available for established companies willing to embrace rapid change without sacrificing their core goals. More encompassing than a “how-to” handbook, this resource is designed for ambitious C-suite leaders eager to implement the future-focused actions vital to survive and thrive. Armed with the same priceless wisdom that Cuatrecasas uses to create exponential returns for his clients, you’ll identify and seize smart ideas on how to invest and acquire to radically improve your positioning.
A Personal Note From Paul Cuatrecasas
I have been advising on tech deals before anyone even knew what a website or email was. We did deals using only a landline telephone, fax, voicemail and a calculator, but it worked.
My first M&A deal as an adviser in my own firm was in 1993, when I advised the $3 billion UK-based information-technology company ICL (now Fujitsu ICL) on the sale of its 50 percent stake in electronic-data-interchange company INS to the other 50 percent shareholder, GE Information Services. I’ll never forget flying in from London to the US East Coast, jetlagged, only to go up against two GE executives twenty years my senior and be beaten up on valuation and price. They weren’t having any of the numbers I used to prove my case. I was shaken and a little stirred, but I hung in there and we got the deal done. ICL remained a client of ours for the next ten years, so I’m assuming that they were pleased with the price we achieved (and the twenty ICL deals and strategic advisory projects that followed).
Over the following twenty-five years, I have witnessed the emergence and explosive growth of the internet, email, the mobile phone (2G, 3G, 4G), text messaging, client-server computing, integrated circuits, the smartphone, video-on-demand, application software, satellite communications, mobile apps, the cloud, e-commerce, photonics, you name it. I’ve also worked with hundreds of different management teams and entrepreneurs, as well as thousands of different investment teams ranging from private equity and venture-capital investors to hedge funds, family offices, and individual high-net-worth investors.
What I can see now is that business has changed forever. We have gone from “business as usual” to “business as exponential.” Companies that don’t see this and don’t adapt quickly to the exponential trends are doomed to have to exit, or to go extinct.
From this experience I’ve accumulated over the years, I believe the next ten years, from 2020 to 2030, will be all about two mega-developments:
- Technology companies will become the new industry incumbents, replacing many of the existing traditional industry incumbents (such as GE), and
- A selection of the leading non-technology incumbent corporates, such as Walmart, McDonald’s, General Motors (GM), and JP Morgan, will remain industry leaders by acquiring technology companies (thus avoiding disruption from Amazon, Uber, PayPal, and a plethora of other amazing technology companies that are rapidly emerging all over the world).
If the non-tech incumbents get it right, then they can improve every line item of their profit-and-loss statements (P&Ls) while also dramatically enhancing the customer experience. If they get it really right, then they could actually exponentialize their market value (or market capitalization), potentially achieving valuation levels that approach those of the tech companies themselves.
If you’re a CEO and you get this right, you will have protected your customers, employees, and shareholders (as well as your own job). In addition, your company should be able to at least double its market cap, no matter the size, at a fraction of the cost of the traditional way to grow your market cap: capex and opex. I believe the ROI over a five-year period for any technology-company acquisition should be at least 10x the level of investment.
Senior executives at almost all mid-sized to large corporates are focused with laser-like intensity on achieving the monthly, quarterly, and annual revenue and profit goals, often at the expense of everything else, including the longer-term strategies on which the company’s survival depends. It doesn’t help that tech companies are an unknown and that the acquisition of a tech company feels like a high hurdle for any traditional company to overcome, especially when there are still so few case studies on which to base research. Scarcely any incumbent companies are willing to be trailblazers, even though it’s clear that the leading companies in most industries are trailblazers.
Today, the pattern of non-tech incumbent corporates acquiring tech companies is very real. It is happening—in every industry, in every developed nation—and it is becoming urgent. Given the pace of change, you have until 2021, which is just before 5G will become a major industrial force, to decide whether or not to become a fully technology-enabled company. Once you decide, you have to move quickly; your competitors have already begun, and your own transformation could take several years. If Walmart, GM, and McDonald’s can do it, so can you. Any company can do it.
I hope that, after reading this book, you embark upon the journey to find the right tech company that’s a perfect fit for you—before your competition does. As Lee Iacocca, former CEO and savior of Chrysler, said, “Apply yourself. Get all the education you can, but then, by God, do something. Don’t just stand there; make it happen.”
About Paul Cuatrecasas
Paul Cuatrecasas is a entrepreneur, investment banker, and strategic advisor to CEOs, senior executives, boards and shareholders of companies operating in or interested in the Technology and Digital industry sectors.
He is on a mission to help large, established, non-tech companies partner with technology companies to avoid being blindsided by exponential change. For over 28 years, he and his firms have been helping these companies find the new strategies and tools they need to survive. It’s something he cares deeply about.
His clients’ success is based on a willingness to bring to the table what other experts don’t, won’t, can’t, or are afraid to. Paul and his team will do what it takes to create a win-win deal, even if it means being contrarian or upsetting traditional thinking.
He has condensed what he’s learned from advising on over 50 TMT M&A transactions around the world worth over $25 billion and on over 70 corporate finance advisory and strategic consultancy assignments for large corporates, start-up tech companies and leading private equity firms, into the book Go Tech, or Go Extinct.
In the book Paul shares what he’s learned from personally conducting one-on-one meetings with C-level executives from over 300 Fortune 1000 companies, as well as the client work executed with several of these corporates.
Working with Paul gets you on the tech company M&A battleground with expert advice and guidance on how tech entrepreneurs & founders think, how they feel, and how they make decisions – particularly the big decisions.
In all of his work Paul promises street-level straightforward advice, proven fact-based tactics, and a departure from traditional business-as-usual thinking and culture.
Paul Cuatrecasas is a entrepreneur, investment banker, and strategic advisor to CEOs, senior executives, boards and shareholders of companies operating in or interested in the Technology and Digital industry sectors.
He is on a mission to help large, established, non-tech companies partner with technology companies to avoid being blindsided by exponential change. For over 28 years, he and his firms have been helping these companies find the new strategies and tools they need to survive. It’s something he cares deeply about.
His clients’ success is based on a willingness to bring to the table what other experts don’t, won’t, can’t, or are afraid to. Paul and his team will do what it takes to create a win-win deal, even if it means being contrarian or upsetting traditional thinking.
He has condensed what he’s learned from advising on over 50 TMT M&A transactions around the world worth over $25 billion and on over 70 corporate finance advisory and strategic consultancy assignments for large corporates, start-up tech companies and leading private equity firms, into the book Go Tech, or Go Extinct.
In the book Paul shares what he’s learned from personally conducting one-on-one meetings with C-level executives from over 300 Fortune 1000 companies, as well as the client work executed with several of these corporates.
Working with Paul gets you on the tech company M&A battleground with expert advice and guidance on how tech entrepreneurs & founders think, how they feel, and how they make decisions – particularly the big decisions.
In all of his work Paul promises street-level straightforward advice, proven fact-based tactics, and a departure from traditional business-as-usual thinking and culture.
Are You A CEO Or Senior Executive That Is Determined To Succeed In The New Economy By Partnering With, Investing In Or Acquiring A Technology Company?
What is your biggest challenge to leading your company into the digital world?
In This Breakthrough Book For Senior Executives, You’ll Discover:
- The keys to transforming your company into a digital industry leader
- How the right acquisitions and partnerships with tech companies will transform your entire ecosystem
- Strategies to deploy the new levers of shareholder value creation
- Methodologies and tactics to investing in the right tech companies by minimising risk and optimising reward
- How to leapfrog your competition in one bold move
- Strategies to finally take the market share that your company deserves
- The keys to transforming your company into a digital industry leader
- How the right acquisitions and partnerships with tech companies will transform your entire ecosystem
- Strategies to deploy the new levers of shareholder value creation
- Methodologies and tactics to investing in the right tech companies by minimising risk and optimising reward
- How to leapfrog your competition in one bold move
- Strategies to finally take the market share that your company deserves