In good times or bad, says Andy Agrawal, managing partner at Charlotte-based Decision Point, which recently released its Q2 Quarterly M&A report, “I’ve been in M&A for 20 years, and good deals always get done.”
Agrawal said he couldn’t address how Charlotte and the Triangle fared in terms of M&A activity, but he said “The Triangle has more robust startup growth and more venture capital. It has more activity and more growing companies. Charlotte has no venture capital and is growing more slowly.
One challenge Charlotte startups face is a lack of early stage capital, which is nothing particularly new.” Fintech has been hot in Charlotte for years, however, and the Decision Point report notes that fintech is one area doing relatively well despite the Covid 19 pandemic.
M&A report shows tech industry move toward cloud and virtual environments
As a result of the pandemic, he adds, companies that did not previously think much about doing things virtually, such as big banks, have realized that a lot of people can work successfully from home.
Considering the savings on infrastructure that having staff work virtually entails, Agrawal thinks that “Whenever we turn the corner, business will do thinks differently. I’m curious to see if the business world ever goes back to the world as it was.”
Right now, businesses are in no hurry to return workers to offices nor educators students to schools because they fear liability if Covid 19 infects them, Agrawal noted.
Among the tech sectors doing best despite the pandemic, he said, “Are niche software companies and artificial intelligence and machine learning. SaaS software is also still hot.
It’s quite a change from 15 years ago, when most software was used for automating tasks.
“Artificial intelligence, which can take data and learn from it, does a lot more than just automating things,” Agrawal said.
Anything to do with virtualization is “super hot,” he added. “Verizon acquired Bluejeans for $400 million to provide its own Zoom capability. We used to do conference calls, now they’re video calls. We’re getting more video communication than ever before.”
Working virtually actually means many people work even longer than when they’re in the office and not infrequently at odd hours. A working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research published Monday confirms this.
“You get calls from a senior person at a big company on a weekend working from home. It humanizes everyone to see them working from their house and at night. More and more of that is going on.”
While working primarily virtually from home, where his three children in their 20s are also working selling software, Agrawal meets with summer interns in the Decision Point office once a week, taking precautions such as wearing masks and social distancing.
