Don't Take the Acquisition Meeting
The corp dev intro sounds like flattery. It's calibration. The buyer learns what you'd sell for, not to buy, and you pay for that in the next negotiation.
The email arrives from a corp dev associate at a larger company. The language is flattering. We've been watching your space and we're impressed with what you're building. We'd love to grab thirty minutes to learn more. The founder, who has not been thinking about selling, feels a small ego lift. The meeting goes on the calendar.
The meeting is calibration. The buyer is not preparing an offer. The buyer is mapping the market. The corp dev team will take similar meetings with six other companies in the space this quarter. The information from each meeting goes into a comparison matrix that informs which company, if any, the buyer eventually pursues.
The information asymmetry is structural. The buyer has done this hundreds of times. The founder has not done it at all. The buyer's questions look conversational and are actually a structured intelligence-gathering exercise. By the end of the call, the buyer knows roughly what the company would sell for and what the company is most afraid of losing.
The founder, in exchange, has learned that a large company is interested. This is not actionable information. Interest does not produce offers. Offers produce offers.
The cleanest move on a cold corp dev email is to wait. Reply politely. Thanks for reaching out. We're not currently exploring strategic alternatives. If your interest is concrete, we'd be happy to look at a written indication of value. If it's exploratory, we'll be in touch when the timing is right for us. The reply either filters out the calibration meeting or produces a written indication, which is the actual signal.
Buyers who are serious will return. Buyers who are calibrating will disappear. The cost of the wait is zero in either case. The cost of the meeting, taken without a price in mind, is the disclosure of information the founder did not yet realize they were giving away.
The exception is the founder who has a number — who has thought through the acquisition, has a price they would accept, and is using the corp dev meeting to surface that number. That founder is in a different position. The meeting becomes a negotiation, not a calibration. But that founder is rare, and most corp dev meetings are taken by founders who are flattered, not founders who are ready.
If you have not decided what you would sell for, the meeting is asymmetric in the buyer's favor. Wait.