Inorganic Podcast

Private equity just bid to take Criteo private at a 50%+ premium and two of the sharpest voices in commerce & media read the exact same filings and reached opposite conclusions. Ayelet Shipley and Christian Hassold break down Vista Equity Partners' (with hedge fund Quinti Capital) proposed take-private of Criteo (Nasdaq: CRTO): the "melting ice cube" bear case vs. Ken Kubec's "Footnote Trade"...

Walmart just bought its way into the connected TV arms race, and The Trade Desk is the biggest loser. In a ~$1.4B deal announced during Cannes Lions week, Walmart Connect is acquiring Vibe.co, the self-serve CTV/streaming ad platform, to close a 10x gap with Amazon's ad business. Christian and Ayelet break down the deal from two distinct angles, the operator's read and the deal architect's read, p...

Accenture Song's planned acquisition of the Whalar agency was called the largest creator economy transaction ever. The structure underneath that headline is far more interesting than the number. In this special edition, Christian and Ayelet sit down with Chris Erwin of RockWater, one of the sharpest analysts in the creator economy, to go deep on what Accenture actually bought, what the founders ke...

Steve Engelbrecht started Sitation from a rental apartment in Somerville, Massachusetts — five weeks after being laid off in the chaos that followed 9/11. Today it's a 62-person commerce enablement firm with a client roster of household names and a defensible niche the big SIs can't easily replicate. Recorded live at Salsify's Digital Shelf Summit in Atlanta, Christian sat down with Steve — founde...

Fourteen deals worth mentioning in a single week. And those are just the ones that surfaced. The week before Cannes, the dam broke. Christian and Ayelet break down the deepest deal review we've done yet — anchored by a transaction Ayelet's team actually advised on the sell side: Residence acquiring GateMaker, a female-founded creator and influencer agency with a blue-chip beauty roster. Plus a spo...

Erik Huberman has acquired 23 agencies in 10 years — and he doesn't pay cash up front for any of them. Recorded live at Possible 2026 Ayelet sat down with Erik Huberman, founder of Hawke Media, for one of the most candid conversations about agency M&A we've ever had. No spin, no posturing — just the actual mechanics of how a bootstrapped agency built a 23-deal acquisition machine focused on th...

A month forecasted that Accenture was about to make a material acquisition in the creator space. This week it happened. Accenture Song is acquiring Whaler Agency — the most awarded creator agency in the Western hemisphere in a carve-out plus three-year partnership that's far more interesting than the headline. But is it really "the largest creator economy transaction ever"? Christian runs the math...

Kevin Simonson has now sold two agencies. The first — Metric Digital to Wpromote in 2020. The second — adMixt to Interluxe Group, announced this week. And he came on In/Organic Live the same week the deal closed to talk about what's actually different the second time around. Christian and Ayelet sat down with Kevin — outgoing CEO of adMixt, now President of Performance Marketing at Interluxe Group...

our deals this week. One disclosed price. The same trade running through all of them — buyers acquiring capability quietly rather than building it. Christian and Ayelet break down what each deal actually signals about where the software and agency markets are heading — plus stick around for the live after-show with Kevin Simonson, CEO of adMixt, on the Interluxe Group acquisition. One deep dive. T...

Most scaled independents looked at Grapevine.ai during the sale process and didn't get it. They couldn't process the economic model. They didn't know how to assess the technology. Justin Hayashi leaned in and won. Recorded at Possible 2026 in the Unplugged Collective pavilion, Christian Hassold and Ayelet Shipley sat down with Justin Hayashi, CEO of NewEngen, one of the most tech-forward independe...

iHeart to start a B2B podcast network — read the signal 7:50 — Podcast agencies are still priced like services businesses, not talent factories 8:50 — The valuation gap: no shared yardstick for IP and franchise value before it's commercialized 9:20 — MARC: building the FICO score for franchise value — Ayelet's startup to watch 9:52 — The data problem: YouTube gives real analytics, Apple and Spotif...

Podean just closed their fourth acquisition in nine months. Travis Johnson is hinting at a fifth. Mountain Gate's strategic roadmap had six puzzle pieces. Four are filled. Two more to go. This is what a PE-backed independent agency rollup looks like when it's working. Travis Johnson — CEO and co-founder of Podean, the largest independent global marketplace-focused agency — is back on In/Organic to...

Everyone wanted the commerce front end. Nobody wanted the data. Joe Gadreau watched agency after agency walk away from the hardest — and most important — part of the commerce stack while he was at Salsify. So he went and built it himself. Recorded live at Salsify's Digital Shelf Summit in Atlanta, Christian sat down with Joe Gadreau, founder and CEO of Lettuce Commerce, for a conversation about wh...

Most AI acquisitions add a layer. This one removed a layer — for everyone else. Anthropic acquired Stainless, the developer tools company that built SDKs for OpenAI, Google, Cloudflare, Perplexity, and dozens of other AI and fintech platforms. Then they wound down all hosted Stainless products. The shared supplier is no longer neutral. The tollbooth just changed hands. Christian and Ayelet break d...

Publicis dropped a bomb on Sunday. By Monday, LinkedIn was on fire. Christian, co-host of the In/organic Podcast pulled together two of the sharpest voices in commerce and media to break down what this deal actually means — beyond the press release. Joining In/Organic for this special episode: Ari Paparo, 20-year ad tech veteran, host of the Marketecture podcast, and author of Yield: How Google Bo...

The Accenture agency acquisition is still in progress. Five AI tuck-ins closed this week across fintech, crypto, process mining, hardware, and spend management. And three deals that tell you everything about where the lower middle market is heading right now. Christian and Ayelet are back for Deal Review Friday — and this one is packed. Three deals. Five AI tuck-ins. One major tease still in progr...

We've been saying one of the big strategics was going to move on a scaled independent agency. It's happening. Christian and Ayelet are back for Deal Review Friday with breaking news on an imminent Accenture acquisition, two lower middle market deals that tell you exactly what the current M&A environment looks like, and what all of this means for the scaled independents that were planning to go...

What does it really take to sell your business — and are you actually ready? In this episode of the InOrganic Podcast, we sit down with Brenda Jacobsen, Managing Director at STS Capital Partners, a sell-side M&A advisory firm focused on helping founders and operators find the right strategic buyer — not just the highest bidder. What makes Brenda unique? She's not a banker by training. She's a...

Something big is coming!... Water cooler conversations at the Possible conference are pointing to a major deal announcement in the next two weeks — a strategic buyer nobody has seen coming, going after independent agencies with significant media underspend. Christian and Ayelet are on the story. Stay close. But first: two deals, two market insights from the Ad Age House session at Possible, and on...

Scot Wingo has built, scaled, taken public, and sold companies through multiple waves of ecommerce and software disruption. Now he’s building again, this time around agentic commerce. In this episode of In/organic, Christian Hassold sits down with Scot Wingo at Shoptalk to talk about ReFiBuy, AI agents, ecommerce infrastructure, SaaS moats, founder survival, and what early-stage companies should d...

Headlines say ad tech M&A is down. We read the actual report. The story is more nuanced — and the two deals we're covering this week prove the lower middle market is still moving fast. Christian and Ayelet are back for Deal Review Friday with a market data deep dive and two deals that just closed — a partner-first aqui-hire by Amex that's been in the works since 2024, and the final piece of a...

Strategic M&A is up 40% year-over-year on LOI volume. And this week's deals prove the closings are following. Christian and Ayelet are back for Deal Review Friday with three deals that just crossed the wire — including Mountain Gate's fifth add-on in under five weeks, a retail intelligence merger that was clearly part of the thesis from day one, and one of the more creative dual-strategic acqu...

Deal Review Fridays are here. No guests, no fluff. Just Christian and Ayelet live with market intel and the deals that closed this week — before everyone else is talking about them. This week: private debt markets are tightening (and it's freezing $100M+ deals), Podean just keeps buying, Mountain Gate is deploying out of Fund 3 at an alarming pace, and MIQ quietly built a mobile M&A stack nobo...

AI agents are moving from experiments to full-time “AI employees.” In this episode of In/organic, Christian Hassold sits down with Ameya Deshmukh from EverWorker at Shoptalk to discuss how business leaders are using AI workers to automate entire jobs, replace point solutions, and change the future of agencies, consulting, and go-to-market teams. EverWorker is building an AI workforce platform that...

Scott Gifis has been around the block. President & COO at Frame.io through its $1.3B exit to Adobe. LP at GTM Fund and Stage 2 Capital. Now CEO of Wyllo (formerly NoFraud), a CX-first risk intelligence platform backed by PSG — and he just closed his first tuck-in acquisition. We caught up with Scott at ShopTalk in Las Vegas to go deep on how he thinks about inorganic growth as an operator, not...