What if you had unlimited money to buy companies to accelerate your business? How should you think about M&A?
That’s a "kid in a candy store" style question, right?
First, you would want to map out the entire business architecture and strategy for the next 12 to 24 months.
Then you want to ask the question "which companies might help us accelerate the execution of this strategy?"
But of course, you must factor in the enormous cost and complexity of integrating different tech stacks, cultures, and processes. Successful M&A is hard, costly, and disruptive.
In order to qualify as a candidate to meaningfully accelerate part of the business strategy, the target company would need to have a massive unfair advantage in the particular category of the business you're trying to accelerate.
OR
You should really only be considering companies you can strip for parts without planning to integrate their legacy tech, culture, structure etc.
Which parts?
A "part" might be “the team”. For example, you could buy a small amazing little consumer product startup and turn them into one of your cross-functional product squad to work on a specific product mission/problem.
A “part" might just be something like their customers. Take their database, migrate some percentage over to your core products (assume only a conservative fraction), and kill the rest of the business.
Ruthless? Yes.
Efficient. Also yes.
Everything else quickly becomes a quagmire.