Any mergers and acquisition professional will tell you the first principle of the M&A game is to thoroughly misunderstand the technology and marketplace of the company you are intending to acquire. That perhaps it behooves “old growth” firms to press pause before buying (or for that matter building) disruptive technology firms? What we’ll explore here are newly-developed behavioral profiles of tech acquirers as applied to the buy v. build v. partner v. wait debate. Entering the Valley leads to over-enthusiastic and ill-fated decisions to acquire or build technology in order to grow. But in the end, due to a lack of market and technology insight, these decisions turn into a white elephant–the corporate equivalent of the Bridge to Nowhere.

Source: Forbes November 23, 2016 16:12 UTC