🏠 What founders should know before, during & after the M&A process

GM! It’s Brett. Might have given the best fireside chat of my career last week.

I invited my friend Mike Heller, a parter at Floodgate, a prominent VC fund, over to a hacker house in SF for a last minute fireside chat for about 50 people

The topic - AI powered fundraising and sales

The key takeaways weren't what you'd expect - read here

I spent 2 years on Google’s M&A team - studying which acquisitions worked, which didn’t, and why.

Getting acquired isn’t luck - it’s strategy. Here’s everything I know.

There are only 3 kinds of deals:

At Google, we’d slot every deal into one of these buckets before doing anything else.

Now that you know the types of deals on the table, let’s talk about what really matters - what to do before, during, and after an acquisition process.

That’s the playbook - simple, not easy.

I covered all this and more stories from Google M&A in this workshop.

Most companies hire SDRs to find leads, research them, and write cold emails.

This guy decided to automate all of it - from finding prospects on LinkedIn to launching full email campaigns - using n8n and a few no-code tools.

1. Find leads on LinkedIn
It starts with Apollo, a database that indexes LinkedIn profiles.
Instead of scraping LinkedIn directly (which breaks its terms), he uses Apify, a web-scraping marketplace that safely pulls LinkedIn data through Apollo’s public listings.

2. Research each company
Every lead is enriched using Tavly AI, which pulls company overviews, product summaries, recent news, and even customer sentiment from places like Reddit.

3. Write personalized emails
GPT then crafts short, tailored cold emails using everything learned about the lead and their company.

4. Run outreach automatically
Instantly AI sends those emails at scale — scheduling, tracking replies, and following up automatically.

5. Manage it all in Google Sheets
All leads, summaries, and messages flow into Sheets as the workflow’s dashboard.

It’s a full LinkedIn → Apollo → Tavly → Instantly pipeline managed by n8n.

No CSV exports, no manual research.

For probably under $100/month, it automates the entire SDR stack - lead sourcing, enrichment, writing, and outreach - with a single workflow.

If you want to replicate this workflow step-by-step, check out the full walkthrough video.

Deel’s simplified a whole planet’s worth of information on global hiring. It’s time you got your hands on our international compliance handbook where you’ll learn about:

With 150+ countries right at your fingertips, growing your team with Deel is easier than ever.

Get the guide

Keyword shortcuts
Use tools like TextExpander or TypeDesk to create shortcuts for things you type often. For example, type ;;meeting and it fills out your whole meeting follow-up. You can even add smart fields like today’s date or a cursor spot for quick edits.

Single task inbox
Use a tool like Akiflow consolidates ALL your tasks from email, Slack, Notion, Todoist, Asana, Trello into a single inbox, then lets you time-block everything directly onto your calendar. It's like having a personal assistant who collects scattered commitments and organizes them for you.

Last week’s poll:

What’s your current automation level?

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ None - I like manual control
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A few Zapier/n8n workflows
🟩🟩🟩⬜️⬜️⬜️ Half my ops run on autopilot
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I’m building my own AI agent

Micro is a CRM that doesn’t feel like homework and an email client that knows what matters. Simply put, it’s an all-in-one productivity tool that organizes itself so you don’t have to.

LHV is a community-driven, early-stage venture fund backing ambitious founders at the earliest stages.

If you’re building tools that help founders, investors and other professionals who want to be 100x more productive with 100x less work, and you’re interested in advertising with us, send an email over to [email protected] with the subject “Homescreen Ads”