How to Start Building Strategic Relationships
The strongest strategic relationships are built over years, not months. There is no such thing as starting too early. The activities that make a startup visible and familiar to potential acquirers are good for the business regardless of whether an exit ever happens. Content, product embedding, and event presence compound over time.
The founders who have the most options at exit are typically the ones who started building these relationships long before they needed them.
Inbound
Sometimes the strategic approaches you. A corp dev team reaches out, a business unit sponsor sends a LinkedIn message, or a partnership lead wants to explore a collaboration. Not all of these will lead anywhere, but too many founders don't prioritise these conversations enough.
Always take the meeting. Always follow up. Treat every inbound as a potential starting point for a deeper relationship.
The downside is that inbound is not something you can control. But the more you do around product embedding and content, the more likely you are to get on their radar. And when you start receiving inbound interest from strategics, that is a strong signal to begin this work in earnest.
Content and thought leadership
The goal is to enter the acquirer's information environment.
The difference between "never heard of them" and "I've come across them" is enormous.
If Databricks is pushing the data intelligence platform narrative, write and speak at that intersection. That means articles in publications the acquirer's leadership reads, case studies featuring shared customers, and speaking on podcasts the acquirer's product team follows. None of this requires mentioning M&A or signalling intent. It just puts you in their field of vision.
Product embedding
Get your product into the acquirer's ecosystem in any capacity: a marketplace listing, a partner programme, an integration, or a joint pilot. This creates internal exposure without anyone having to pitch. Product teams start using it, engineers can evaluate the code, and the company becomes a known entity inside the acquirer.
When an internal champion eventually makes the case for a deeper relationship, they can point to real usage rather than a slide deck. That is a fundamentally different conversation.
Warm introductions
Shared customers are one of the strongest routes in. If a customer uses both your product and the acquirer's platform, they have a natural incentive to connect you, because closer integration benefits them directly.
A lot of my work at Priori is leveraging corporate development relationships to facilitate warm introductions. In some cases there are other paths, like existing investors with relevant connections or mutual board members. The key is that the introduction comes with context, not just a name.
Direct outreach
In some cases there are relevant strategics but no natural way in. Direct outreach works, but it has to be thoughtfully positioned and tailored. Generic emails to corp dev inboxes do not work.
A good setup is to let me connect with the corporate development team while the founders reach out in parallel to the relevant business sponsor. Two entry points, coordinated but independent. The corp dev conversation establishes the commercial frame, and the founder conversation builds the product conviction.
How these relationships typically progress
Most strategic relationships follow a similar pattern regardless of how they start.
The first meeting is exploratory: understanding each other's business, finding areas of overlap, assessing mutual interest. By the second or third meeting, the other key stakeholder should appear. If the conversation started with corp dev, the internal champion joins. If it started with a champion, corp dev enters. The conversation naturally gets more specific about the product and how it fits.
If the champion hasn't appeared by the third meeting, that is typically a sign that internal conviction is lacking.
Subsequent meetings become more tactical: discussing a potential pilot, doing a technical deep dive with engineers, or exploring a partnership structure. Not every relationship will follow this progression. Some will stall, some will move faster, and some will go quiet for months before reactivating.
The key is to keep enough relationships active across your priority acquirers that there are always a few moving forward, and to avoid letting warm relationships go cold.