Every Acquisition Is a Bet on People: What Leading Integration of Acquisition Deals Has Taught Me

There are two very different jobs hiding inside the word "acquisition."

One is doing the deal — sourcing the target, negotiating terms, getting to signature. The other is everything that happens after: absorbing a team that didn't choose you, untangling a product that may or may not work, and rebuilding a business under a deadline while it's still running.

Most executives who put "M&A experience" on a resume have done the first job. Over the last fifteen years, I've mostly done the second — and more often than not, I did the first job too, so there was no one else to hand the mess to afterward.

I thought it will be interesting to analyse six of these deals that I have led directly and the varied experiences associated with each.

When There's No Product to Integrate

The clearest example of this is also the least obvious one, because on paper it reads like a product story.

In 2015, I acquired Ruplee, an existing in-restaurant payments company. I didn't acquire it to bolt onto an existing product. I acquired it before PayLo existed as a business at all. There was a team, there was a company, and there was a problem I'd identified from Foodpanda's own delivery payment gaps. There was no working product that solved it yet.

So the job wasn't integration in the usual sense of merging two functioning things. It was taking over a team that had built one thing, convincing them to build something else, and doing it fast enough that the acquisition made commercial sense before the runway ran out.

What came out of that was PayLo's entire journey — in-store payments after demonetisation, an omni-channel payments platform, interoperable QR system ahead of UPI, a crypto wallet, and eventually PayLo's own acquisition.

The hardest version of a deal isn't fixing a broken product. It's when the only asset is a team's talent, and your own conviction about where the market is going.

Owning the Integration, Not Just Approving It

Foodpanda made more than 20 acquisitions globally during my time there. Two of them were companies much older and of scale — TastyKhana.com and JustEat.in, both significant consolidations in the Indian market — which I owned and integrated directly, on the ground.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Approving a merger from the board, and actually merging two teams, two tech stacks, two operating cultures, and two sets of customers without losing either, are not the same skill. The second one is where deals actually succeed or fail. It's also the part almost nobody puts on a slide.

Integration, I've come to believe, is a retention problem wearing a technology costume. The tech stacks merge in weeks. Whether the acquired team's best people are still there in six months is decided in the first thirty days, by how the integration is actually run.

Integrating Into a Larger, Regulated Group

At Zee Group, Essel Finance acquired Bimadirect, expanding the group into insure-tech. This was a different kind of integration again — a regulated financial services business folding into a much larger diversified group, with all the governance and compliance complexity that comes with it.

Integration inside a large, regulated parent is a different discipline from integration inside a startup. You're not just merging teams. You're reconciling two risk appetites and two definitions of "done." I got sharper at that discipline here than I would have anywhere else.

A Legacy Brand, Acquired and Rebuilt

I've written elsewhere about the full story of acquiring and rebuilding Digit — a brand I read as a college student, and one I had the chance to bring into the Times ecosystem years later and turn around within a year. If you haven't read that one, it's probably the most personal deal on this list.

What I'll add here is simpler: acquiring a known brand compresses your timeline in a way a blank-slate acquisition doesn't. You don't get eighteen months to find product-market fit. You have existing readers and existing skeptics, and the only way to change the narrative is to ship visible proof of life fast, and keep shipping it.

The Latest One

Most recently, Times Network acquired Opigo, a stock advisory marketplace and investor engagement platform, to expand ET Now into invest-tech and wealth-tech as ET Now Pro. It's early days. But the shape of the work is familiar by now — fold a founder-led team and product into a much larger platform, without losing what made the acquired business work in the first place.

What Six Deals Have in Common

I've never been the executive who leaves after the deal closes. In every case above, I was there for the part that actually determines whether an acquisition creates value or destroys it.

I've also done this without a playbook far more often than with one. Ruplee had no product to integrate around. Digit had a brand but no functioning modern business. Each of these needed the diagnosis built from scratch, not applied from a template.

And I've done it across regulated and unregulated businesses, startups and large corporates, and more than one industry. That range is the part I trust most. A deal-and-integration instinct that only works inside one industry isn't really an instinct. It's a coincidence.

If there's a single thread across all six of these, it's this: I've never been afraid to acquire a company with more problems than assets, because the assets were never really the product. The team, the brand, and the timing were. Closing the deal was always the easier half.