As a veteran M&A lawyer in the Bay Area, Louis Lehot has advised many public and private companies, VCs, investors, and more on forming, financing, governing, and buying and selling companies.
Formerly with DLA Piper, Louis founded his boutique law firm, L2 Counsel, to serve the unique needs of entrepreneurs and investors, specifically those young founders in the early startup phase.
He talks about that work as well as the changing role of data, technology, and IP in deals.
Tune in to discover…
- How rep and warranty insurance has changed the game
- Avoiding “extra” tax liabilities as a seller – and how counsel can help
- The biggest mistakes companies and founders make with IP
- What the future of M&A looks like in a post-pandemic world
- And more
Listen now…
Mentioned in this episode:
Transcript
Patrick Stroth: Hello there. I’m Patrick Stroth. Welcome to M&A Masters where I speak with the leading experts in mergers and acquisitions. And we’re all about one thing here, that’s a clean exit for owners, founders and their investors. Today I’m joined by Louis Lehot, founder of L2 Counsel. L2 Counsel provides practical and commercial deal lawyers for founders and their investors. L2 is focused on legal strategies and solutions that make sense, which is really important when you’re getting into some complex deals.
Lou is a veteran of m&a transactions representing the who’s who in Silicon Valley. Last month, I had the pleasure of joining Lou on a panel for structuring IP and technology acquisitions. So I asked Lou to join me today and share his perspective and predictions and I’m really excited to have him here. Lou, it’s a pleasure having you. Welcome aboard.
Louis Lehot: Patrick, thank you so much for letting me join and speak to your audience. I’m a Silicon Valley lawyer. I’ve been practicing for 20 years. And I love to help founders, management teams and investors plan really smart exits, according to the theme of the situation. And I have so much fun in what I do. I have a great team of lawyers in my firm called L2 Counsel and an extended network of other lawyers that I bring in according to the circumstances.
And it’s a pleasure to be with you. Like most of your listeners, I’ve been sheltering in place and working from home and trying to find ways to stay connected with people. And Patrick, I was so grateful that you joined me in my webinar a couple of weeks ago on how to structure IP and technology acquisitions. And I’m just thrilled to have the opportunity to speak to your audience about, you know, what I’ve learned along my journey and how I can help.
Patrick: Yeah. And Lou, before we get into the IP issues, because this is not just limited technology companies, it’s essentially everybody now and we can get into that. But let’s back up before we get into L2 Counsel and M&A. Tell us about yourself real quick. What brought you to this point in your career?
How Louis Got to This Point in His Career
Louis: Oh, thank you, Patrick. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in the East Bay in the hills above UC Berkeley. And I watched my father who is a PhD in computer science, go from entrepreneurial venture to venture and I caught the startup bug when I was at a very young age. I went off to college in law school on the east coast and found myself in Europe helping multinational corporations access the US capital markets. And after I met my French wife and had two kids, you know, she had the smart idea that we should move back to California.
And we came back in 2005 and have been here ever since. Recently, I was running DLA Piper’s Northern California operations and their, co-leading their venture capital team. And I stepped away in October of last year and took some time off and came back to the market just as COVID was shutting us down with a new market offering to fill what I see is a gap in service where, you know, young founders, in the earlier stages of their startup, and when they go to exit have the most and the greatest need for legal services.
And those are the times when they have the least amount of cash. And so calling up a lawyer who might have some giant hourly rate is a big impediment to, you know, forming that relationship and growing it. And so, in my new structure, I’m trying to find creative ways of making sure that I can build long-term relationships with founders and management teams and investors that are not based on the billable hour or with built-in disincentives for us to build our relationship.
So that’s what we’re doing, Patrick, and we’re really having a great time. I think at the outset of COVID, we all tried to get the deals done that we had in process. And as of this recording July 10, you know, we’re starting to see brand new deals where, you know, buyers and sellers have not actually met each other and who have built enough of a relationship over Xoom and email and phone calls and video calls that they’re launching transactions to create inorganic growth and I’m really excited about that development and I think it bodes well for the rest of the year.
Patrick: Well, I share your view and your optimism. I also have been noticing how necessity has become the mother of invention. And it was unthinkable of doing an M&A deal unless the parties were in a room physically together, to be able to look each other in the eye and see the whites of their eyes and, you know, get up all the body language and everything. Sometimes that’s just not possible. And I’ve seen, like you, not as many but a few of these things moving forward.
First of all, let’s just talk about technology because, you know, technology 10 years ago was thought of as those are the Silicon Valley, those hardware, software companies, okay? Today, every company is a technology company, okay? Whether you are a manufacturer or restaurant chain, you’re deploying and utilizing some kind of intellectual property. Talk to us about that. I wonder what the perspective is on the challenges for these companies that may not think they’re IP intensive and how things have changed in the last 10 years.
Every Company is a Technology Company
Louis: That’s a great question. When I started out in Silicon Valley, I think there was an idea that really our companies were built on the back of two things. One was the idea and two were the people that knew how to implement the idea. So it’s technology and people. And the way we did transactions was really designed to grow the technology and bring along the people that were essential to the technology. And we viewed it as very much a wave of growth. It started here in Silicon Valley and would go eastward until it went abroad.
And I guess the biggest development of the last 20 years, I would say, is that when I see it and meet a new company now, it’s just as likely that that company will achieve its first dollar of revenue outside the US as inside the US. It’s just as likely that its intellectual property will be developed in another part of the world as it will here. And I guess, I believe that the key to success for all of these businesses is that they plot a strategy for the development of their intellectual property from inception and that they identify what it is.
And, Patrick, you know, I think the greatest development of the last year is the realization that the data that is created or harvested by the technology company is also part of that portfolio that needs to be addressed from inception. You know, how can you harvest the data? How can you create the data? How can you protect the data? How can you keep it private? How can you keep it secure? And so, when I work with early-stage founders, and especially when I help bring them to exit, really telling the story of what that is, is often the most compelling thing about the reason why a buyer wants to buy them.
Well then as you move into the execution of the transaction, you’ve got to anticipate, you know, what a buyer is going to be looking at to determine that they’re getting the full value and that they’re mitigating any potential risks. So it used to be that buyers would, you know, focus on a freedom of operation analysis to make sure that there was a sufficiency of patents and that the patents didn’t infringe anybody else’s patents. And today, you know, many companies never get patents. Their business is really based on trade secrets.
It’s based on computer code that they would never want to write a patent for just because of the time and expense and that it would render it public. And then, you know, they obviously have some of their greatest assets that they harvest from their trade secret software code is data. And so I don’t care whether you’re making masks or machines, you know, there’s data that’s flowing through your supply chain and your customer chain and the ecosystem that your product lives in. And, you know, harvesting that and monetizing it is the challenge of our time.
Patrick: What’s, when you have a client there and they’re looking for an exit, okay? Let’s talk about the structures that. You know, very simply, what kind of structures are available out there for these companies?
Structures for Exit Plans
Louis: Great question. And, you know, when you’re looking to sell your business as a seller, you would like the buyer to take the entity so that you have no further ties or obligations. Those become the buyer’s ties and obligations. And so, you’re looking to either do your transaction through a merger, which is the easiest way to sell your company because it doesn’t require 100% of the shareholders to sell their, each and every one of their shares. Each of the state laws allows a merger as long as a majority of the outstanding shares of capital stock approve it.
And some states have some additional requirements that, such as in California that each class of shares separately votes on that. But a merger, a share purchase is really in the best interests of the seller. It also guarantees the seller that they know what the tax treatment is going to be on the sale, which is simply going to be hopefully, a long term capital gain with the purchase price that they receive minus the price that they paid per share, which if you’re a founder, is hopefully a peppercorn and all of that as long term capital gains.
Now, a buyer is going to look at several other ways to structure an acquisition. First, and this doesn’t always come to mind, but if you’re a buyer merely looking to get access to technology, a license is a really great way to go as it doesn’t give you the requirement to maintain the electoral property.
It doesn’t make you a liable for any breaches of those patents by somebody else or breaches by those patents of somebody else’s patents. It doesn’t give you any of the historical liabilities for failure to pay payroll tax or any of that. So a license is really an easy way to go for a buyer. Now, they’re going to want exclusivity of the intellectual property. And so they’ll want the ability to develop it, grow it. And so acquiring the IP through an asset acquisition is often something that the buyer wants really just to control it better and to better monetize it. So an asset acquisition is another way that buyers look to do transactions for IP.
Patrick: I just want to break in here real quick. In light of the economic climate out there where you’ve got a lot of companies that are struggling, do you sense that they’re going to be a lot more attention on opportunistic buyers to really push the asset acquisition as opposed to either allowing a merger if they can’t get a license?
Louis: Absolutely. You know, I think that buyers are going to be looking to opportunistically supplement their own portfolio of products and an asset acquisition and then the recruitment of the people that know how to monetize the IP is often the most protective way for a buyer to acquire the business. It’s an asset acquisition, leave behind all the liabilities, leave behind the entity, leave behind the employees and whatever liabilities that may have occurred and then directly recruit the employees that they want cherry-picking them on a person by person basis.
Patrick: Grabbing the talent. Yeah.
Louis: And why that’s not the best thing for sellers is that typically, the company will have to pay tax on the difference between book value of the assets that were sold and the amount of proceeds that they receive. And then when they dividend out those proceeds to the shareholders, the shareholders then pay a second level of tax.
So whereas in a merger, you could have, if you’re in the state of California 33% tax, if you’re selling your assets, you could pay a flat 20% corporate tax and then the individual of 35% in California 13% on top and suddenly, it’s over the vast majority of the transaction proceeds are going to Uncle Sam. And so not the best outcome for sellers. I would say the other risk for sellers and an asset acquisition is that the buyer has the right to, unless you contract around it, the buyer will get to attribute basis on an asset by asset basis.
And, you know, you as the seller could get hit with the wrong tax treatment on a specific asset. And so for example, you know, a big risk is if there’s a lot of basis that the buyer attaches to some sort of a non compete or intangible asset that you don’t have basis in. And suddenly, you as the seller paying all this extra tax on top of what I already described. So, if you are a seller doing an asset deal because you have no other way of doing it, you really need good counsel and really strong accounting to make sure that the deal is what you think it is and that you minimize the damage.
Patrick: I would say that, you know, another way the seller can try to negotiate and engaging a solid return that’s done these deals before, is, you know, the number one reason why a buyer doesn’t want to buy the company and everything is because they don’t want to assume any, or pick up any of the liabilities there might be that they don’t know about, okay? Either IP, HR legal, things that the buyer didn’t know about and, you know, they perform due diligence. You know, they’re on the hook just as if that target company committed them post-close. And so there is a way to transfer that risk away from the buyer, and that’s with rep and warranty insurance.
Louis: Yeah, you know, that’s a great point. Rep and warranty insurance has been really a revolution in how we do deals. And it’s, you know, I think it’s in the interest of buyers and sellers to externalize the risk of breaches of reps and warranties, with insurance. And it really takes the sting out of, and the friction out of an ongoing relationship between a buyer and buyers’ new employees who are helping the buyer monetize the IP and really going back to those employees and thanking them for, you know, indemnification claims is really the last thing you want to be doing.
And the easiest way to de-incentivize them and demotivate them from doing what they need to do. But you know, Patrick, there’s something I wanted to tell you about representing startup companies and growth companies as they come to the market for sale. And that’s that they’re all so special.
They all come with their own history and relationships and problems. And so what I do as counsel to two sellers, is I come to them, and I schedule a three-hour meeting and I go through my 20-page checklist that I’m constantly updating of every question that I can think of that will impact how to do the deal. And so I’ll give you an example. A lot of founders will have family members in the company.
And if you don’t ask the question, you won’t find this out until the day after the closing when the founder calls you, you know, that his daughter’s crying that she lost her job. And so if you don’t, you know, anticipate those issues at the outset, you know, you can have a bad surprise. And another one I’ve seen multiple times is the founder of the business also owns the facility and has an arm’s length or some rental agreement between the company and her or his family trust that owns the property. And, you know, if you don’t anticipate that, you can have issues.
Trusts and estates, when you’re really in the money on your business and you go to sell it and it’s your life’s biggest asset, you really want to be thoughtful as early as you can about taking advantage of trusts and estate and, you know, family planning vehicles, so that, you know, you can put the money in the places that will best benefit, you know, you and your stakeholders. And I can go on and on. But, you know, I’ve got this 20-page checklist, Patrick, that I really need to spend a lot of time with my clients on to understand what are the issues and how we can best structure deals.
As we look forward to the rest of the year, Patrick, I am seeing a lot of early-stage companies running on fumes, running out of cash running out of runway and they’re going to be faced with a tough decision whether they empty more of their personal savings into the company or whether they bring it around for sale. And some of those companies will, you know, will fail and they’ll end up either in chapter seven or 11 bankruptcy proceeding if there’s sufficient business that it merits the expense of that process. Or, you know, I often find that the IP simply is assigned for the benefit of creditors.
And you have specialist firms like Sherwood partners or Armanino, or one of others, many others that will go, you know, keep a database of assets that they hold on behalf of creditors that are for sale and buyers will be in touch with those brokers of insolvent assets to acquire pieces of intellectual property that they need. And so, you know, one example I’ll give you is, you know, I had a client who had a business idea that might have involved repurposing some product to help turn those into ventilators. And we discovered through the process of mapping out the technology roadmap that we needed some licenses.
And so we went to business brokers and found who had what we needed and took out a license. We didn’t actually acquire the intellectual property, we just took a license to it. And that was one way that whoever had bailed out on their business was able to monetize it even after the business had failed. So I expect to see a lot of restructuring transactions, a lot of assignments for the benefit of creditors, and a lot of, you know, new and important ways for people to learn how to monetize intellectual property and structure technology acquisitions and sales.
Patrick: I think that’s a great role that you provide there, Louis, you and your team, is that people may be thinking that okay, there’s only one way out and it’s not going to be a favorable one unless we go ahead liquidate our personal assets and I think they come to meet with you, all of a sudden, all these options open up that they never knew existed.
And the larger firms don’t have the time to deal with those smaller things and probably don’t focus on those options. They’re too busy worrying about much larger needs of larger clients. I think you meet a great need there. The other thing is important is with that 20-page questionnaire, I mean, your objective when you’re representing sellers is what?
No surprises when they’re negotiating with a buyer. You don’t want buyers coming in here all sudden asking the uncomfortable questions that turn up some real big problem that could derail the deal. From your experience just solely with regard to intellectual property, what are some red flag things out there that buyers, you know, buyers are gonna be asking you about that either your clients don’t think about or just aren’t as prepared as they should be?
Intellectual Property Acquisition Red Flags
Louis: That’s a great question, Patrick. And, you know, On my long list of questions that I go through with a seller that I’m working with the first time is how did the intellectual property first come into the company? And upon formation, did the founder assign her or his intellectual property to the company? I’m always shocked to find the number of defective assignments of IP at formation.
And so that’s an easy fix as long as the founder that contributed that IP is still around. But if you have a co-founder that was really key to the development of the IP, that formation has departed and you have no leverage to get that person to sign in as assignment later on that can be sticky. Another red flag is prior employment of the founders. And so, you know, if the founder worked making bread at Acme CO and was responsible for the designing of the baguette and then suddenly starts a new company and guess what? Baking bread and the designs are the same.
You know, that can be a big problem. So typically, technology companies and any company, when they hire an employee will ask them to sign all of their intellectual property to the company that is their employer that they create during their duties during their nine to five job and that relates to their job. And so I always want to know, from a founder, what was their prior job, what were they doing and what paper did they sign.
Another one is, you know, in the life of a startup, you know, it used to be that you could exit a company in three to four years and today, I think the average time to exit for a company is more like 10 years. And so, you know, there’s gonna be a lot of people coming and going during that 10 year period and you’ve got to make sure that every employee from day one has signed an assignment of invention agreement so that you can put hand on heart and tell the buyer that when they acquire the company that they’ve got all the IP without any claims from employees that the IP is in fact theirs.
So the famous example was when Cruise, the automatic autonomous vehicle company, came out for sale to General Motors, there was a former co-founder that raised his or her hand and said, Hey, I’m actually co-founder and I actually, you know, owned X percent of the company and the idea was mine and there was no paper. And so I believe there was a settlement and I don’t know that the settlement was ever disclosed, but I’m sure that it was painful for the management team of Cruise that upon sale to pay that out.
So that’s another red flag. You know, another one is that I find often are, especially here in the Silicon Valley, or, you know, we have a lot of professors from Stanford or Berkeley or one of the other great universities in a 50-mile radius of this technology hub that spins out of the university to create a company or even creates it in the lab. And you’ve really got to be careful at formation that the intellectual property that’s in the company actually belongs to the company and not the university. And oftentimes, you’ll see spectacular problems when universities have claims to the IP. I see that a lot in life science companies, especially.
Consultants and contractors, just because you hired someone as a consultant doesn’t mean that they, you don’t have a similar risk of them claiming rights to ownership or intellectual property. Or worse yet, that they were misclassified as a consultant that they were, in fact, an employee. And so you want to make sure that your consultants and contractors are all papered. You know, all of this can be remediated, Patrick, for the most part, and fixed and cleaned up and oftentimes founders take shortcuts because they think can all be cleaned up later.
And while that’s usually the case, sometimes the people that you need to clean it up are, you don’t have them at your disposal or they don’t want to agree to the cleanup and you end up having to pay them out. Finally, I guess another area of red flag is joint ownership. And so, you know, whether it’s founders that form an LLC where they put the technology and then the technology from the LLC gets licensed to the company or if it’s a, you’ve partnered with a large company, one of the big tech Silicon Valley players and you’ve jointly owned the property, how can you then sell it?
So those are some of the big issues. I guess I’ll just finish by saying, you know, that in today’s day and age, we see just a ton of enterprise software companies coming to the market. And, you know, they’re essentially selling a platform of software that’s written on a code stack. And that code stack needs to be analyzed once a year for open source code. Open source code is code that’s already been developed. And the condition to using that open source is that if the, if your code contains the open-source code, then you then have automatically granted a license to everyone in the community.
Patrick: I’ll echo the concern with a prior employer because I mean, that’s the running little joke around Silicon Valley is we’ve got, you know, we’re home to a number of very large search engines and social media platforms. And within those organizations are thousands and thousands of engineers working there that quietly have their own little pet project in their side drawer, just waiting for the day to go ahead and step on out and open up their own shop.
Louis: Yeah, yeah. Well, I could go on and on with red flags, Patrick, but I hope that’s a good introduction for your audience. And I can to talk about specific problems and ways to solve them.
Patrick: Well, they’re, I mean, with, as you said, all these organizations are unique. And so they all have their story to tell and they need someone like you that knows how to ask the right questions. Why don’t you give me a profile of your ideal client?
Who is L2 Counsel’s Ideal Client?
Louis: Oh, that’s a great question. And thank you. You know, I have set out to target four areas in the market where again, I think there’s a real disconnect. You know, the first is entrepreneurs, management teams and investors at formation and as they go through the life cycle. And so, you know, sometimes you meet the lawyer that’s right for you as you’re exiting your prior employment and you do it all right.
And sometimes, you don’t meet the right person until you’ve just closed the Series B round and you just meet someone and you click. So for me, you know, the best introduction is that formation or as somebody coming to market with financing for their company. So that’s the first area. The second area is when that entrepreneur or business comes to the market for sales, the sell-side M&A.
And oftentimes, I’ll get introduced by their banker, I’ll get introduced by one of their investors or board members or members of their executive team. And, you know, I really try and distinguish myself, you know, with a great network of relationships, you know, deep experience and, you know, a really personal approach that starts with that three-hour meeting going through the 20-page checklist to think of every possible issue that is leveraged for and against in a deal.
You know, the other times, or ideal clients, for me are our larger technology businesses that are looking to create an acquisition machine. And so I help a number of larger tech companies design forms, design, you know, term sheets that are, you know, firm but fair and that are designed to help deals get done efficiently and mitigate risks. And so that’s a really fun part of my practice.
And then the last part of my practice is I work with a lot of investors across the value chain from, you know, large growth equity investors like the SoftBank Vision Fund or Riverwood Capital or others to, you know, real early-stage investors, you know, that come in with a half-million-dollar check. And I help them design, you know, an instrument that best reflects their horizon for investment and harvesting and that gives them a set of rights that works for them. And so those are kind of the four areas that I’m targeting in my new firm, Patrick, and, you know, I welcome new conversations with folks in those areas.
Patrick: And this is a regional where you’re doing as long as you stay in California?
Louis: You know, my practice has always been what I call garage to global and, you know, I’ve lived in worked in Europe, all over the east and west coast and in Asia and so while, you know, most of my day to day company-side clients are here in the Bay Area. You know, I work with investors and acquirers all over the world.
Patrick: You were good enough to publish an article in CEO Magazine recently where you were putting out your predictions for M&A during COVID. And we were hoping a month ago that we’d be in post-COVID right now, but we’re still kind of bumping along. Why don’t you share a couple of your predictions for M&A as you see from your perspective?
Louis: Sure, sure. I think that there’s a window of opportunity right now as technology buyers and sellers have been kind of locked in place and sheltering at home. And really, I think there were a couple of months where not a lot of deals got done other than kind of finishing things that were in the pipeline. And even those deals that were in the pipeline, for the most part, got restructured with some sort of a 10 to 20 to 30% haircut on the pre-COVID valuation. I’m now seeing this window of opportunity blasting open as the economy reopens, has been reopening since I would say mid-May.
And I’ve been seeing investors and buyers willing to look at new transactions, new investments, new acquisitions, on a remote work from home basis. You know, everybody’s still responsible to their stakeholders for delivering growth and, you know, COVID or no COVID, work from home or not, you know, if you want to, you know, capitalize on your opportunity, you’ve got to make the best of your circumstances. And so I’m now seeing, you know, a really strong uptick in M&A activity, both from strategic and financial buyers.
I think that as valuations, especially in the lower middle market have fallen down by a good third, I’m seeing the private equity buyers are really finding their appetite to go and do deals, Patrick, because, you know, it’s been a tough five years for financial investors and strategic ones as well to justify paying the kinds of valuations that private companies were demanding in the market through the boom. And, you know, COVID is really an opportunity for, you know, value-based investors to get assets at a fair price, or at a price that they can justify to their limited partners.
Patrick: Would you see maybe initially more M&A activity for add ons where, I’m looking at private equity specifically, where rather than take a big jump on a new platform is maybe you already know what you have and maybe making smaller investments on the add ons or go for the platform, because you’re gonna save a lot more money now on those larger deals that are going to be cut by 30% then on an add on. I mean, just out of curiosity.
Louis: Yeah, that’s a great point. And I will tell you that I’ve seen both. And so I’m currently working on a new platform acquisition that will be the platform for a technology vertical for a private equity firm. And, you know, they’re very excited about it and excited about the valuation that they were able to obtain and really believe that, you know, this will allow them to further, you know, do those add ons that you’re talking about.
And I’m working with another private equity firm on doing those little tuck-ins, revenue add ons really, or product add on features. And so I think both platform and add on deals, we should be able to see those happen now through the end of the year. I predict a really big fourth quarter. I think people were thinking big third quarter and maybe slower fourth quarter because of the election.
But I think that, you know, the economy is going to slowly reopen and we’re going to play whack a mole with all of these COVID spikes, and it’s just going to build momentum. And I think that, you know, the fourth quarter, hopefully, it’ll be a little bit more under control and, you know, people will really want to get their deals done before there’s a change in administration, whether it’s, you know, whoever wins, there’ll be a change in administration and, you know, the associated risk of change of policies and change in market dynamics.
And so I think the fourth quarter is going to be really big. And then finally, as we’ve alluded to before, I think there’s going to be a lot of technology businesses that just have to come to the market for sale because they have to. And then they’re going to be a bunch that would have been for sale in the first half were it not for the pandemic, but so there’s kind of the pent up supply that’s going to come into the market on the second half.
And then I think 2021 is going to be a big year for private equity sales. I think there’s a big backlog and I think a lot of these technology companies have done really well through the pandemic, and they’re going to look to sell at bigger multiples and they’re going to be a lot who really struggle where people are going to give up. And bring those in and either restructure or bring them in at lower multiples.
Finally, there’s one thing we haven’t talked about on this call, Patrick, which is the IPO market and that’s really been booming last month, totally unexpectedly. And I believe the second quarter of 2020 was the biggest quarter for issuances of equity in the history of the US capital markets. And I think that, you know, that really bodes well as capitals return to firms and they’re able to then, you know, deploy new capital or raise new funds. So the IPO market is a great bellwether for M&A as well.
Patrick: Louis, how can our audience members reach you?
Louis: You know, I have a website which is my name, louislehot.com and then my firm is l2counsel.com. And there are multiple ways of finding me on those websites. And Patrick, I’m really grateful for the opportunity to speak to your audience. And I shouldn’t close before I thank you for being so innovative and having brought rep and warranty insurance into the lower middle market as it’s really a product that before I met you was really reserved for sales of 100 million dollars or more.
And the need for rep and warranty insurance at all levels of the value chain is critical and especially in the smaller middle market deals where It’s so price-sensitive and where an indemnification issue can be so dramatic. And so, you know, Patrick, I look forward to continuing to work with you as we navigate these choppy markets.
Patrick: Yeah, I put together a list of the 10 reasons why I love insurance, why I love M&A. And I consider M&A events. The most exciting business event out there. It is where dreams come true, legacies get made, and it’s very exciting just being a small contributor but just being around it is really given me that surcharge set, you know, find my purpose and stuff.
So, and it’s great because now we’re able to bring this service and this product down to the innovators and the creators where they took, there was nothing there and from nothing, they created tremendous value. And to help them and reward them is just the least I could do. And it’s working around people like you that, you know, like I said, you work with who’s who in Silicon Valley. So it’s been great. So Louis, thank you very much. And I look forward to talking to you again. Folks, look for him on LinkedIn. He’s got a ton of fabulous content.
Louis: Thank you, Patrick. And have a great weekend.
Patrick: You do the same.