GrowthPoint Technology Partners gets startups in order

A history of tech M&A excellence

Mike Shepherd is CEO, Founder and Managing Director at GrowthPoint Technology Partners, a boutique technology-focused investment bank located in San Francisco, California. 

GrowthPoint Technology Partners is an investment bank that provides financial and M&A advisory services to technology companies globally. They recently celebrated their 17th anniversary; 17 years of helping their clients deploy and grow their technologies around the world.

“A lot of the companies we work with at GrowthPoint are emerging growth companies, and so what really matters for our clients initially is what problem have they solved, and what technology have they developed? We take the time to understand the technology. Most of us are engineers or have a strong engineering background, and as a result, we really understand the value of what's being developed,” says Mike. 

“Second thing that we do, we really understand how to position that technology strategically so that an investor or an acquirer can see how they can grow that company into a much larger company,” he says.

Mike has a long history of working in the technology space and an impressive list of transactions under his belt, including with companies like   Accenture, Dell, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, NetApp, Oracle, Qualcomm, and VMware, among many more. Prior to co-founding GrowthPoint, Mike was a principal at SVB Alliant, focused on software M&A transactions, and before that, Managing Director of the Nextera Interactive division through to its IPO.

Having worked in technology M&A for so long, Mike knows the right software is key to successful deal preparation and execution.

“The third thing that's really important to do for preparation is to create a Data Room, and creating that Data Room, that process, really brings order to the chaos of all these entrepreneurial startups and these early-stage growth companies, that oftentimes don't have their act together. The requirements of an acquirer, often, they only want their HR people to see the payroll and the personnel stuff, and they don't want any of their people to see any patents, as a good example. So even though we put all that information in the Data Room, Ansarada allows us to only allow the specified people to see certain documents, that's really helpful.

The dashboard's really useful because we can see the progress that different participants have made in terms of preparing the Data Room, so that we can say to the acquirer or the investor, ‘hey, we're 80% done on the data room’, or ‘we're 90% done’. It also helps us identify the folks who aren't getting their work done so that we can bring resources to help them to get it done,” says Mike.

“Really, overall with Ansarada, I'd say the user interface is just so much better than all the other Data Rooms that we've used - and we use them all,” he says.