Ask A VC: Merus Capital’s Sean Dempsey On The Role Of Corp Dev And More

In this week’s episode of Ask A VC, Merus Capital’s Sean Dempsey joined us in the studio to give us an inside look at corporate development, and how that translates into investing.

Dempsey was previously a Principal of Corporate Development at Google, where he helped lead the acquisitions of YouTube, Android and Postini. He also spent over six years at Microsoft in the Corporate Development team. Between Microsoft and Google, he led over 100 acquisitions and investments.

We chatted about the big acquisitions (i.e. WhatsApp), as well as some of the smaller acquisitions that end up being meaningful to a company. And Dempsey shares his thoughts on the similarities and differences between Google’s acquisition of YouTube and Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp.