[bradstewart]

No knowledge of Google specifically, but that M&A team is often part of strategy unit that's constantly looking at potential acquisitions to fill gaps in product offerings, valuing internal business units for possible sale, etc.

So it's not just actually executing M&A. Once the target is identified, the actual deal execution often falls to lawyers/bankers.

[somethoughts]

I'm curious about how compensation works for such internal M&A teams.

Definitely I don't have any real insight into IBanking but as I understand there's usually IBanking M&A division whose activity (and corresponding compensation) generally revolves around two activities - generating pitch books to generate transactions and then generating transactions. I imagine for IBankers there's only incentives to generate transactions regardless of whether they are good or bad for the two parties actually involved in the M&A transaction. I'm not aware there's any activity/compensation tied to the long term (i.e. 10 year ROI) success of deals.

It'd be smart if internal M&A divisions were held to higher standards - not only being measured on number of pitch books generated and transactions closed but also additional OKRs/compensation regarding the long term success of previous transactions for the company.