With the holidays behind us and another year on the horizon, it feels commonplace to polish up the crystal ball and look towards predictions for the upcoming year. After all, there are many factors at play that could impact the broader economy and the M&A environment.

November was another strong month for M&A with $9.9bn announced. In terms of notable transactions, StubHub’s sale to Viagogo accounted for nearly half the total, coming in at $4.1bn. OpenText also made a large acquisition, with its deal to acquire Carbonite for $1.4bn, or 3.5x revenue.

While we don’t often see Canadian buyers in our sellside processes, we ask ourselves in this blog post if our buyside work is an isolated occurrence or is this a pick up in Canadian buyers part of a bigger in trend.

Getting into Podcasts but don’t know where to start?  Well, hopefully we can help, because we’re podcast addicts! 

There’s so many tech podcasts out there and its hard to find the ones with the best content. So, we’ve listed our favorites below and why.

We had a really good response to our recent post about the Rule of 40, with several CEOs reaching out to us to discuss the implications for their business.  As a result, we thought it made sense to take a look at the public SaaS companies and see which ones were performing well versus this metric and how their respective valuations compared.

Given that the second quarter earnings season is largely behind us, we wanted to take a look at how the largest technology stocks performed this quarter. 

In previous blogs we have talked about the importance of metrics other than just revenue growth. This is particularly important for established software businesses that are looking to pursue M&A. Some buyers (and investors for that matter) use the Rule of 40 when evaluating prospective investments. But what is the Rule of 40 and why should you care?

If you looked at the year-to-date software M&A volume of $64.6bn and compared it to last year’s full year amount of $183bn, you would probably conclude that there has been a dramatic slow down in M&A activity for software companies this year. 

We come across numerous examples where CEOs have challenges leading up to the sale of their business – an emotional journey that often comes with any M&A transaction

Given Sampford’s recent achievements in the Canadian tech community, I saw an opportunity to be part of something unique, while further learning more about my interests in various niche tech sectors.

If you listened exclusively to the VC community, this article would be pretty short, as almost all of them would tell you that the only thing that matters for a SaaS company’s valuation is revenue growth, at all costs.  However, for the vast majority of mid-cap SaaS companies, this is not the only relevant driver.

On the Let’s Grab Coffee podcast, Sampford Advisor’s George Khalife sat down with Dennis Mortensen who’s the Founder & CEO of x.ai to chat about entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, and exits.

2018 was a good year for tech, and a particularly great one for Canada with global tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, and Google directing their investment dollars to Toronto.

According to a report by brandwatch, the total worldwide population was 7.7 billion as of January 2019. Of those 7.7 billion people, 44% are active social media users (or 3.397 billion). The average daily time spent on social is 116 minutes a day. That’s significant.

According to Deloitte’s annual study of M&A activity, technology acquisition became the number one driver of acquisitions in 2018 ahead of expanding customer bases in existing markets, or adding to products/services.