103: What CTOs Miss Before an M&A Deal Hits
About this episode
Jaco Vermeulen discusses the importance of preserving value before creating it in the context of M&A deals.
Most CTOs chase value creation. Jaco Vermeulen says the real job is preserving it first. Build your own CTO Playbook at www.theCTOplaybook.com - the leadership platform built for the full CTO journey. Coaching, podcast, and community to help you lead with clarity, confidence, and strategic impact. Boards across the mid-market are running AI pilots that return nothing, and revenue is being booked long before it's ever realised. The gap between the story a business tells about itself and what's happening underneath has rarely been wider or more expensive. My guest is Jaco Vermeulen, an interim CTO, CIO, and M&A specialist who has worked through more than 50 transactions and spent 25 years finding what's hidden in that gap. Jaco doesn't want to talk about technology. He wants to talk about what the technology is meant to do for the business, and why most leaders get that order wrong. His stories from carve-outs, acquisitions, and portfolio integrations show how much value gets destroyed by assumptions nobody bothered to check. If you're an engineering or science leader who has never sat close to a transaction, this one will change how you read your own company. And if you…
More episodes of The CTO Playbook
- 105: The CTO's real job when agents write the code (belief reversal)
- 104: Why the Best CTOs Filter the Firehose Instead of Blocking It
- 102: AI Transformation Starts With What You Don't Know You're Assuming — with Duri Chitayat
- 101: Why Most Leadership Assessments Are Measuring the Wrong Thing
- 100: Why AI Is Quietly Draining Your Senior Engineer Pipeline
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