M&A Science
How to Structure an Acquihire Deal in the AI Talent Race
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Derek Liu, M&A Partner at Baker McKenzie
Acquihires used to be priced at roughly a million dollars per engineer. Now buyers pay hundreds of millions, sometimes billions, for a team, and the old deal structures can't carry that weight.
Derek Liu, M&A Partner at Baker McKenzie, explains why tax leakage is pushing these deals back to stock purchases, so you inherit the whole company when you only wanted the people. Diligence flips with it: less time protecting IP, more time validating engineers before signing and planning how to exit what you don't need. He also covers why some acquirers now ask founders to revest 100% of their proceeds. "We're not paying you for what you've already built."
Derek's clients keep asking, "What's taking so long? All we want are the people." Part of the answer is wind-down diligence: which customer contracts you can exit, and which roles have to go before close. DealRoom Diligence lets you create, assign, and track every one of those requests in one workspace, built to "reduce your due diligence time by 50% by centralizing your diligence process." See how it works: click here