Obviously when you are getting up to bat 300 times a year you will have errors

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, on a software acquisition gone wrong

In September 2021, JPMorgan Chase acquired a startup called Frank – a college planning financial application. The startup was just 4 years old but it was on the rise and could give Chase the boost it needed to compete and innovate in fintech. Its founder was compensated somewhere near $30 million in stock and retention bonuses. Chase was getting some hot new tech and some hard-working founder was getting rich. Everyone was happy…

Fast forward to 2023 and that startup founder is being charged by the SEC for fraud. It turns out the numbers weren’t quite as impressive as they made them out to be – they’d fabricated millions of user accounts that didn’t really exist to orchestrate a big payday for themselves. JPMorgan Chase spends billions on their technology strategy every year. They can afford to be wrong. Can you?

Riding the Acquisition Wave

We’re on the cusp of a major exchange of wealth and intellectual property. Everyone is talking about the wave of baby boomers retiring and selling their businesses. But there’s another movement gaining steam: websites and SaaS applications are being sold left and right. Startup marketplaces and brokerages are all over the place and they’re continuing to grow in popularity.

Startups go bust. Developers get bored with their side projects. Founders realize they don’t want to be operators. However it happens, there are hundreds of projects popping up. And smart investors are on the other side of the table mining for gold. But looking for gold involves throwing out a lot of rocks.

Gold Coins

Ever seen those clips in movies where someone bites into a coin to make sure it’s real? Well the legend goes that a lot of counterfeit coins were made of lead instead of gold. Lead is softer than gold and biting into the coin was a way of telling the difference. In this new wild west of acquisitions, there’s a lot of lead floating around. That’s where we come in.

We bite into the lead coins so you don’t have to (strong teeth). We’re the last line of defense between Internet fraudsters and serious investors. We can go deep into the technology stack to tell you whether what you think you’re buying is what you’re actually buying. We’ve seen these deals. There’s potential in a lot of them but, frankly, there’s also a lot of junk. And even though you may be able to score a good deal on some founder’s failed startup, you want to know that it actually works.

Our Process

Do you know what an N+1 query is? Are you more likely to find Ruby or Fortran developers in abundance? What’s a unit test and why should you care? Database backups. Outdated dependencies. It’s a lot to balance. Good news. We can hand-hold you through all of these concerns and more.

Whether you’re a first-time or veteran buyer we’re ready with white-glove service. Here’s how it works:

• We set up a call to determine whether we’re a mutual fit and discuss your goals and timelines.
• Our team reaches out to the technology team on the other side of the table so we can begin diligence.
• We run our playbook – a detailed checklist that tackles reliability, security and scalability. This is our secret sauce mined from years working in startups and public technology companies.
• You get a tailored report with our assessment and recommended next steps.
• If you want, we help you staff customer support and engineering roles.
• You grow your acquisition to the moon and end up sipping mai-tais in Maui.

Ready to take your next acquisition to the moon?