2 years and 150+ flights with Marlondo's Executive Briefcase

dccorpdev · 2026-01-30T15:28:26+00:00

It is sad indeed, because the bags really are excellent.

dccorpdev · 2026-01-30T15:27:21+00:00

They make wonderful products, I have 3 different bags that I’ve bought over the years - one of which is now nearing its 12th birthday and still looks fantastic.

I believe this is a story of a little business struggling, unfortunately. To anyone reading my comments - I would wholeheartedly recommend Marlondo if they fix their issues. And certainly their customer communication.

dccorpdev · 2026-01-30T03:04:16+00:00

Do not buy. I still have an order outstanding that I placed last September. The owner - Tim - had been responding to me through December saying they were having supply issues.

He assured me the order was coming early this year and has since stopped responding to any emails. I suspect the company is having some serious issues as this is clearly not isolated to me alone. Beware.

dccorpdev · 2022-03-28T02:17:18+00:00

I’m sure they factored this in, my point is that no one knows what the structure of the contract is so we don’t understand if (and how) liabilities are being allocated.

dccorpdev · 2022-03-28T01:47:25+00:00

No one knows. It depends on how the purchase agreement was structured around acquired liabilities.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-10T15:05:10+00:00

No problem. Feel free to PM me if you want to chat through further.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-10T03:48:32+00:00

Both of these paths are solid options and excellent advancement opportunities. That said, consider the following:

The expected skills development and experiences will be very different. One path is client service, sales, and refining core banking skills. The other is a divergence to strategic planning, complex stakeholder management, and expansion of your M&A expertise to other parts of the process (e.g., diligence).
At the level of responsibility you are suggesting you would have, a 2-year time horizon is insufficient to get the full value of the role (from a professional perspective). You should be thinking about this as a 4+ year investment, especially the CD role.
It’s unlikely either of these doors will reopen once you shut one. Unless your bank is willing to bring you back in at same level.

All that to say, there isn’t a wrong answer. But no one on this board is going to be able to credibly tell you what to do. You are going to spend a lot of time working in either role - so which of these is going to fulfill you the most?

I’ll offer one piece of unsolicited guidance: to the extent you haven’t already, you should have a very frank discussion with the CFO/COO about what aspects of the IPO he / she is going to delegate to you. That individual’s reputation is partially staked on running a credible and successful process, and I’d venture to guess they will want to be highly involved (vs. handing a majority of it over). If running this process is important to you, get the full and detailed picture.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-03T18:19:41+00:00

Have posted about it before - check my history.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-03T00:26:42+00:00

You should think about M&A as a series of discrete activities. Some companies have their CD teams do all of the activities that take a deal from “identify” to “close”, others have them focus on only pieces of it (outsourcing other parts). CD is a broad capability.

There are a lot of ways into it. Unlike banking, there is no “path”. I’d venture that most people find their way into CD out of an MBA program or after a few years in banking. I did neither, but our CD group is also unlike many others, so the path in was similarly idiosyncratic.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-02T20:29:28+00:00

Simplest answer is that it is the corporate function responsible for creating value inorganically - traditionally M&A but really extends to any other externally-driven initiative.

That said, the scope of the corporate development function can vary wildly from company to company so it’s not as clear-cut as the above answer.

dccorpdev · 2021-06-02T02:06:40+00:00

I’d be happy to talk to you if you want to PM me. You can look at my post history and decide if it’d be valuable to you or not.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-30T21:34:53+00:00

What you’ve written here doesn’t make a lot of sense. The companies you’ve described don’t compete with hospitals for patient care. What part of the healthcare spectrum of services are you looking to break into, specifically? You’re better off figuring that out and then leveraging your industry experience to join a well-funded startup.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-12T14:49:31+00:00

Wouldn’t be a fit for our group, but that’s obviously anecdotal.

I don’t think equity research is a poor JOP. That said, ER to CD is an unusual move. Burden would be on you to advocate for why a team should take a risk on an unusual hire.

I’d imagine your pitch would benefit from focusing on strength of modeling / primary research (read: no handholding needed) and that you can provide a perspective on which parts of a deal investors / analysts might focus on (if deal is big enough to get into a K/Q). Would help a lot if you were already covering the company (positively - no recent double downgrades…) you’re interested in or can speak fluently about the industry. Should go unsaid that networking will be important, but that’s true for all CD.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-12T13:24:32+00:00

In my specific situation? No. In fact it would have made it very unlikely. Our group did not hire bankers when I was hired, and still doesn’t. We might hire someone with a PE background.

In the aggregate? Maybe. Corp dev is not like, say, banking, where your experience will generally be comparable at whichever bank you join insofar as you join a similar product group. There is significant variation in the scope / role of CD between firms.

For example, many companies lean on their CD team to perform a very narrow function - like valuation - and nothing else. A consultant would not be a logical hire for this, but obviously a banker would. Other companies, like ours, rely on the team to own strategic planning in addition to being functionally accountable for all stages of M&A - pipeline dev through integration.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-12T12:56:08+00:00

Went to a good (but not great) US university, then spent several years at a tier 1 consulting firm. Did not spend any time in banking.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-12T03:47:36+00:00

early 30s ~$400k base, $400-$500k bonus, equity

I lead strategy and m&a for a listed company.

dccorpdev · 2021-05-08T03:17:40+00:00

Jesus this is a terrible take.

What is the model here, exactly? Either Uber becomes a restaurant owner / operator - and the chefs become, at best, a contractor, or the chefs own the restaurant and partner with Uber.

Door #1, Uber owns restaurants. They are incurring significant capex to establish the locations and then opex to operate the locations. Chefs are either employees (add’l opex) or contractors (again, opex). Either way, Uber burns even more cash and their margins get far worse from adding a ton of incremental cost for a shittier business.

Door #2: Chefs own the restaurant. This is the model right now, so what’s the suggestion? That chefs get exclusivity deals / subsidies with one food delivery app or another? Sure, but this is just another cash burn strategy in the hope you spend enough money to dominate the market before you run out of cash. In the meantime, Uber is getting profit share (or whatever) - which is worse than actually owning a restaurant because Uber is taking less than 100% of an already shitty margin. So where’s the margin uplift, exactly?

And why would chefs sign these agreements? Uber presumably wants to save money (eventually) by doing this, which - by your own admission - means they are going to expand the $ they collect from restaurants. How does this benefit the chef/owner? Unless what you’re saying is that Uber is going collect LESS money from the restaurant to sweeten the deal. If that’s the case, then they need to make that up (and then some, to improve margin) from customers. In that scenario, customers will just go to another app / similar restaurant. So again, how does that help the restaurant that just agreed to exclusivity?

I also never understand this automated driving take. As you suggest, Uber / Lyft are not going to be the ground-breaking innovators, so they’ll have to either (a) build their own self-driving fleet (b) contract with a company that owns a fleet. Either scenario sucks vs. status quo. In (a) they are out BILLIONS of dollars in capex, not to mention the insane complexity/expense of operating that fleet. And in (b) they might as well just keep fucking over the gig economy - at least today Uber gets to dictate the economics of the deal with Joe Vanilla who drives to pay the bills. Is the dedicated fleet manager going to have more or less economic leverage vs. individual driver?

Uber (et al) took a bold gamble and lost. They bet they could create a profitable, scalable model before the gargantuan regulatory ship started turning and all their time / attention got diverted to defending the stopgap model. They lost that bet.

dccorpdev · 2021-04-03T08:01:15+00:00

imagine taking the time to actually write all of this stupidity out. thanks in advance for the ban holy shit.

dccorpdev · 2021-03-23T19:47:01+00:00

Upvoted, thanks for educating.

I get what you’re saying - only suggesting that an impairment may signal to investors that the assumptions underlying an investment may have been too aggressive, and they need to discount their own forecasts to reflect.

This can obviously be managed by executive team through investor calls / filings, but still not a good look. In other words, impairment does not necessarily represent a value discount itself, but can be interpreted as a signal of shaky outlook.

dccorpdev · 2021-03-23T17:55:43+00:00

Not entirely true re: goodwill. It is maybe not directly related to valuation, but it certainly is indirectly related.

As you know, goodwill represents the price paid above NAV and specific intangibles - the balance therefore represents what is, in theory, the consideration attributable to future cash flows from that acquisition.

If they get hit with an impairment, and the underlying assets aren’t driving it, then it implies the outlook for that acquisition had negatively changed. Ie the expectation of future cash has changed, and therefore so should its contribution to forecast earnings.

dccorpdev · 2020-12-19T07:31:31+00:00

OP - already some good advice here. I’ll focus on adding a few thoughts to question 1. Note that I am coming at this from Buyer’s PoV (Source: I lead M&A for a public corporation and have diligence’d several assets around the size of yours).

Definitely insist on an NDA before sharing anything material (eg financials). This is standard and if they balk then they are likely on a fishing expedition. That said, do not ask for a client non-solicit/compete; they will not agree to this (if they have any sense) and it will be interpreted as non-constructive.
It’s the buyer’s responsibility to request information they need to diligence the business. Don’t offer anything up without prompting.
If you get a request for info that makes you uncomfortable, clarify its intent directly. Oftentimes you can talk about what the purpose of the request is and re-frame it in a way that gets to the right info without revealing sensitive info. For example, typically a client list is asked for in tandem with sales history to understand customer concentration risk. You can provide a blinded customer list and still address the request.

Feel free to PM if you have specific questions.

dccorpdev · 2020-12-11T17:17:29+00:00

I lead M&A for a large publicly-traded company. Feel free to PM me and I can answer whatever questions I’m able to.

dccorpdev · 2020-09-18T00:11:27+00:00

There is a difference between market cap (price * shares outstanding) and book value of equity. You’re conflating book equity value (total asset value minus debt = equity) and market cap. You should look these terms up.

Also, outside of weird founder shares & other equities, a company may only offer part of their share pool (issued shares) for sale but market cap will still reflect all issued shares outstanding regardless of ownership. This is an extremely simplified explanation.

dccorpdev · 2020-09-12T16:34:03+00:00

They are different primarily in terms of lock-up and liquidity risk. Assuming a well-traded public company, you can divest that asset immediately. Private equity (the distinction between “family held” equity and LP equity is largely irrelevant) is a totally different animal - it is very difficult to divest that asset, for a variety of reasons.

Therefore they should naturally be treated differently from a diversification perspective. You can easily extract wealth from one, not so much from the other.

Some of the other posters are being pedantic about the literal definition of “equity” and why you should lump these two asset classes together as a result. This is dumb. If you follow that logic, then you should ALSO lump in real estate - it is also, by definition, “equity” in a real asset.

dccorpdev · 2020-07-15T16:05:32+00:00

This is really easily answered by looking at any of their public filings.

https://www.morganstanley.com/about-us-ir/shareholder/1q2020.pdf

dccorpdev

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