How Should Today’S Unicorns Think About Exits?

James Kim, Partner at Qalatyst Partners and head of the Consumer Internet and Fintech divisions, boasts an impressive M&A track record spanning 25 years. Throughout his career, he has orchestrated over 50 M&A transactions with a cumulative value of over $100B, including Pixar to Disney, Credit Karma to Intuit, OpenTable to Priceline, Afterpay to Square, Motorola Mobility to Google, and Fitbit to Google. James has been with Qalatyst since 2008. Prior to his current position, he was in the Mergers and Acquisitions Group at Credit Suisse. He has also held roles at Advanced Technology Ventures and Morgan Stanley. James holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Stanford.

Aneal Vallurupalli is the Chief Financial Officer at Airbase. His background includes early- to late-stage corporate finance, corporate development, operations, and tech M&A. Most recently, Aneal was the Vice President of Finance & Operations at Mattermost, where he still serves as an advisor. At Mattermost, Aneal grew the company’s enterprise value, with a 4x increase in revenue growth and by leading the $50M Series B. He also managed the company’s fully distributed global growth by doubling the number of countries it operates in, and growing employee count by 5x. Prior to that, he was the Head of Strategic Finance at Mapbox, where he led the company’s $164M Series C round of funding from SoftBank, and was the founding member of the Corporate Development team at Guidewire (NYSE:GWRE), helping it to grow from a $800M private company to a $7B public company. His career began in technology investment banking at Union Square Advisors, completing a range of public and private M&A transactions, including buy-side, sell-side, corporate divestitures, and restructurings.