The Access Team works with Silicon Valley Nano Ventures and Ken Epstein on Mergers and Acquisitions. Ken has extensive experience on both the buy and the sell side, including working as a senior venture manager with Down Chemical and as an investment banker.

Typically working on the sell side involves a smaller retainer and a larger success fee, while working on the buy side involves a larger retainer and a smaller success fee. Ken also has extensive experience with cross-Pacific M&A and some experience with cross-Atlantic.

M&A Overview:

The two ways to achieve liquidity (stock has value and can be sold) for team members and investors in a start-up or early stage company is either via an initial public offering (IPO) or by selling the small company to a large company (merger).

Similarly to fundings, the process involves generating a pool of potential buyers and qualifying the best candidates. The usual case is to close with one buyer. The motives of the buyer are to acquire customers, people (the team members), products, and technology. The buying company is usually larger than the company being purchased and usually has the manufacturing and marketing mass needed to grow business rapidly.

In turn the team and investors in the selling company may end up with cash or with stock in a public company (the buying company).

A non-typical transaction is the purchase of YouTube by Google, where the YouTube team and investors ended up with $1.2 billion in Google stock.

At times the successful start-up / early stage company may prefer to acquire other (usually smaller) companies in order to bulk up to the point where the successful start-up / early stage company can achieve a high valuation IPO.

The IPO would be undertaken by firms such as WRHambrecht, who created the on-line "Dutch auction" that generates the best possible market price.