Backtrace was acquired by Sauce Labs in July 2021. Hear more from the Co-Founder, Abel Mathew, about the entrepreneur’s experience with GrowthPoint. The deal team provided a depth of wisdom and firm relationships with M&A departments and VCs to reach desired outcome.
What is the relationship with GrowthPoint or engaging with GrowthPoint in this process? The first thing, and this is where again, being vulnerable and honest, do not expect any firm you engage with to do everything. They will never do 100% of the process. I would even argue that they don’t do a majority of the process for you.
What GrowthPoint does provide though is, first and foremost, the ability to think through and provide wisdom of how these deals get done. They provided me with stories and narratives, past experiences they’ve had selling companies that allowed me to frame how I should think about my strategy. And that’s a crucial part, because when you provide constraints and requirements on a process, it’s much easier to enumerate what you need to do as opposed to it being just kind of this blank canvas.
The real power of GrowthPoint, though, was in the depths of the process. Once you’ve engaged with a product or technology team because the stage of Backtrace that we were at, it required that level of engagement, it required a champion within the technology department because that was the only way we knew how a deal would get done. But once you get past that stage, you get someone that has that inkling of a notion to say, ‘Hey, there might be something here.’
That’s where GrowthPoint can really kick in because of their existing relationships with M&A departments across, not only every of the major firms, but also with venture capitalists. It provided the relationships we needed such that when a product person would go to their M&A team and then we were able to say, ‘Yeah, we’re working with GrowthPoint’, it would ease the conversations.
It would get us from step five instead of starting at step zero. And that is hugely beneficial because it’s all about timing and it’s all about relationships in this deal process. So, the second biggest benefit that GrowthPoint provided was existing relationships with M&A teams. There was a trust that was there. It was actually quite beneficial. In fact, I found it in some ways funny and I found it serendipitous almost in that there’s this notion that they had no idea who I was in my company.
And here is an M&A department that has a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars. But because we were working with GrowthPoint by association, there is a reputation that we were given that greatly benefited us.
Abel Mathew, Founder of Backtrace Acquired by SauceLabs