Pete Huang

Now in that time period, either body can ask for more information or sue you to block the deal, etc.,

So let's go back to our friends in Silicon Valley.

In this new regime, it has become clear that big tech mergers are simply not going to happen.

So some high profile deals for you.

Amazon said they were going to be buying iRobot, which makes those robot vacuums that roam around your living room.

That was going to be a $1.4 billion deal.

Now, this deal was announced in 2022.

It's immediately flagged by both American and European regulators, and it becomes delayed all the way until January of 2024.

In January, Amazon decides that the way the discussions are going with regulators, this deal is not happening.

And so as a result, the deal is off and iRobot has to lay off one third of the company and gets rid of the CEO.

Here's another one.

Also in 2022, Adobe announced they were gonna buy their upstart rival, Figma, who was nipping at their heels at an aggressive pace.

Adobe was planning on overpaying for Figma like crazy, a price tag of $20 billion, which doubles Figma's valuation from their last fundraising round.

and again this deal gets thrown in timeout until late 2023 when they decide there's no path forward and they decide to call it off and this time adobe has to pay figma 1 billion dollars as a result of the breakup in both of these cases the primary reason was actually european regulators aggressively blocking the deal but once they do call it off the ftc and the doj on the us side

Both issue statements basically supporting that the deal is off.

They don't actually want these deals to happen.

You know how I said at the start of this episode that people involved in startups would be really annoyed if there was something that made it harder for them to sell their shares?

These deals impact their ability to do that.

Here's why.

Let's say you're an investor in a startup.