Notes on LAVA, Google Keynote

I attended the annual LAVA Investment Capital Conference (Los Angeles Venture Association) Wednesday at the Biltmore downtown.

The lunch keynote speakers were SALMAN ULLAH Director of Acquisitions and SEAN DEMPSEY Principal, Corporate Development at Google.

Salman claimed that Goog responds to almost all email inquiries from prospective partners / M&A candidates. He said they don’t return phone calls because they don’t do phone well. Of he didn’t mean FASTCALL411-type phone, but I think it’s an interesting comment.

Salman and Sean outlined the Goog corp dev world. They spent quite some time on offline – print, radio and TV. Offline is clearly a big area of growth for Goog. Not all of the offline biz model will be pay-per-call, but surely some will (fair to assume none will be pay-per-click – at least for the foreseeable future). They also said they acquire companies with great teams and who have domain experience in areas were Goog does not. The other sessions were interesting - I will try to post some more notes later.