Boat Meeting Deal Intel

A story about how Shaan used an informal connection to gather intelligence before a key meeting with Twitch's CEO during their acquisition.

"When we sold to Twitch, I had gone through corp dev and they got me a meeting with the CEO the next day. I didn't know how to frame what we were doing to the CEO, but I remembered I had met a guy on a boat in Australia who worked at Twitch as an exec.

I hit him up and said, 'Can I get a beer with you today? I have a meeting with the CEO tomorrow and don't know how to navigate it.' He agreed, so I met with him and asked about what the CEO was like and what to expect.

Then I asked him, 'When you're in these exec meetings at the highest level, what are the top three priorities? Which one of those is stuck? Which one needs a solution?'

He told me they had this initiative everyone was bullish on, but they didn't have the right team or tech to do it, and their current guy wasn't good with tech.

So the next day when I went into the meeting with the CEO, I positioned our story perfectly - we're great at doing this one thing, I'm a great leader who knows tech, we have the team, and we already built the technology. I packaged our story as the solution to their specific problem rather than just listing all our features and achievements."