The Carbon Copy Breach: Shhhh . . . M&A Negotiations Are Confidential

TechCrunch has a post up entitled “I Wish More People Bcc’d Us On Their Confidential Acquisition Emails.“  Apparently, a company named myYearbook had sent an offer to acquire a startup called FunAdvice.  For some reason, the CEO of FunAdvice bcc’d TechCrunch with his response (which rejected the offer).

Now, airing this kind of laundry publicly is quite odd.  Normally these kinds of offers are only made after the parties sign a confidentiality agreement which restricts them from disclosing any of their conversations (check out our confidentiality agreements here).

For your information, the type of confidentiality agreement which businesses normally use when they are negotiating mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is a Confidentiality and Standstill Agreement, which we have right here (with all of our legal explanations and question and answer wizard showing all the alternatives).

I don’t know if myYearbook and FunAdvice had a confidentiality agreement in place, but I would be surprised if they did not.

Regardless, when TechCrunch asked the CEO why on earth he would do such a thing, he apparently said:

 “I won’t do that again, I thought techcrunch would find it interesting.”

Breaching confidentiality agreements, or, at the very least, showing bad form by making such an offer public, is not justified by a back handed attempt at garnering some publicity.  Moreover, if you want a major site like TechCrunch to cover you, it’s probably not a good idea to fail to capitalize the capital letters in their site name.  We wouldn’t like that at “whichdraft.com” either.

Very strange all around.

If you enjoy this content, add me at twitter.com/JasonAnderman, thank you.