M&A Science

Kison Patel runs DealRoom, an M&A workflow platform, and this is the show he built around his day job. That sounds like a conflict of interest, and in a lesser show it would be, but Kison mostly uses his position to get corporate development leaders from places like Cisco, Xerox, FastLap, and a rotating cast of mid-market acquirers to talk about deals in concrete detail. The catalog is past 400 episodes now, which means if you want to find one specific guest talking about one specific topic, the archive is genuinely useful as a reference. Topics run through the full deal cycle: sourcing and building a proprietary pipeline, due diligence that catches the things a data room won't show you, the valuation arguments that actually move a negotiation, integration planning that starts before signing instead of after, and the uncomfortable stuff like retention, culture misfit, and the post-close morale cliff. What makes the show work is that Kison asks practitioners how they handle specific failures, not just wins, and corp dev people are usually willing to talk about that with him because he speaks their language. Episodes drop twice a week and run forty-five to sixty minutes. If you work in corporate development, investment banking, private equity operations, or integration management, this is close to required listening.