Hamilton Helmer

Well, it's very related.

If you're acquiring a company, the primary question you have to ask yourself is,

is why is this worth more to me than to the seller?

Because there will always be an information asymmetry.

The seller will always know more about the asset than you will.

There's a ton of financial analysis work on this.

And, you know, you can't get it perfectly, but basically they look at the stock price before and after acquisition and all this stuff.

And if you distill all that, what it basically says is, you know, the acquirers kind of break even or whatever, and the seller does very well.

And the fact that they figured that out for a large segment of business was genius.

And so that then question of what do you bring, you can imagine how that touches on this subject of business definition and so on.

And that's why antitrust authorities get so upset about it.

If you horizontally acquire in something with scale economies,

That just makes your advantage that much more.

And so people get upset about it and people would love to do it.

But, you know, Hart, Scott, Rodino, we'll let you get away with it, right?

And rightfully so.

But you have to be very, very disciplined because often what happens if you're inside a large company and facing these decisions, and I've been involved in many of them, what happens is the argument that's often made to advance that is, oh,

Well, we don't have to have the same number of accountants or we can kind of reduce their sort of these cost reduction personnel overlap thing.

Never works because they're diseconomies of being in a large organization as well as economies.

And they're sort of a wash is a good assumption about it.