Digital M&A Mastery

Digital M&A Mastery
M&A Strategy, Due Diligence, and Integration for the Digital Leader

Technology and technology-enabled deals are priced on a story and lost in the first ninety days. Digital and AI businesses do not behave like the companies the classic M&A playbook was built for. The value sits in capabilities, networks, code, data, and people, and any of it can walk out the door before the integration plan is even approved.

This book is a working guide for buying and integrating digital companies without paying for a narrative you cannot capture. It shows you how to tell a capability purchase from a scale purchase, how to price the difference, and how to protect what is fragile before you optimize anything.

Across 29 chapters, it follows the full arc of a deal:

• Diligence by asset type: the technology stack, pricing and packaging, cybersecurity, the algorithmic workforce, geopolitical risk, product and R&D, services, and customer experience
• The new business models: networks and platforms, AI products, APIs, IoT, blockchain, and everything-as-a-service
• Integration that holds: the IMO, synergies, go-to-market, change and adoption, talent, decision-making under pressure, AI in execution, and wargaming
• Newer deal types most playbooks ignore: acqui-hires, high-priced tuck-ins, carve-ins, distressed acquisitions, and activist situations

Every chapter opens with the deal-term or integration implication, gives you one framework and a worked example with real numbers, and closes with the diligence questions to carry into the room.

It is written for the two people who usually sit on opposite sides of a transaction: the principal who underwrites and prices the deal, and the integration leader who has to make it pay. Read the other side's chapters too. The argument of the book is that these are one job: diligence predicts integration, and integration delivers what diligence underwrote.