David Kochalko, senior vice president at Thomson Reuters, will speak on "Making a Company Attractive as an Acquisition Target."

He will focus on the primary reasons one company acquires another and the myriad ways in which sellers can make their company attractive to the right suitor. With 20 years as a buyer of information companies, Dave will describe the underlying needs of the buyer, how the seller’s assets must align with these needs, and winning strategies that sellers use to attract buyers and close the deal.

Whether the owner of a start-up, a would-be entrepreneur hoping to build a business, or a current employee of an information company, all attendees will find valuable insights to tuck into their playbooks. One day, they may even pitch their ideas to Thomson Reuters.

Dave Kochalko is Vice President, Product and Market Strategy, at Thomson Reuters, Intellectual Property and Science, in the Scientific and Scholarly Research business unit. He joined Thomson in 1992 to lead corporate business development for Thomson Corporation’s Institute for Scientific Information, served as President of Thomson ResearchSoft from 1994 to 2007, and thereafter led Business Strategy for the academic and government unit until 2011.

He has actively worked on a number of Information company acquisitions including Niles Software (EndNote), ScholarOne (ePeer review workflow software), Discovery Logic (data mining and analytics), and Personal Bibliographic Software (ProCite) before working at the Michigan-based start-up Personal Bibliographic Software with founder Victor Rosenberg (now an associate professor at UMSI). He earned an MBA, dual master’s degrees in public policy and applied economics, and a BA–all from the University of Michigan.

The talk is part of the Google Lecture Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The lecture series is sponsored jointly by Google, the School of Information, and the SI CREATE student group at UMSI that encourages entrepreneurship.