“There’s a team of people that sit around a U-shaped table,” said Ed.
“You’re sitting in the middle and there’s a conclave of people just typing
the whole time. They ask a question and then someone’s typing. They
actually have a bunch of people off-site whose whole job was to take
whatever was typed and create a daily report at the home office so whoever
there was managing the process could then ask follow-up questions the next
day.”
The only breaks were for lunch and dinner. The Samsung executives
repeatedly brought up their disastrous acquisition of AST Research nearly
two decades earlier, explaining that they were going ahead with the
acquisition only because Jay Lee was forcing them to.
As the pair sat through meeting after meeting, they could see that
Samsung’s managers didn’t get the point of software or building an
ecosystem. They treated software as an afterthought to the Galaxy’s
hardware. One team didn’t understand coding basics. Another didn’t get the
point of building a user community. “Why do you do it this way?” they
would ask.
“The acquisition negotiations just kept dragging on because they needed
J.K. Shin’s final sign-off,” Daren said. But Shin, the crusty old Samsung
mobile chief, remained skeptical. He couldn’t oppose Jay outright, but he
could stall the acquisition process. Samsung employees would report back
to South Korea, and then additional bureaucrats would show up. Each
would pass the buck to someone higher, a bewildering process of consensus
building. No one had the power to say yes. Everyone, it seemed, had the
power to say no.
After nearly a year of dragged-out due diligence and negotiations, Tsui
and Ho were thinking of pulling out of the deal.
“We were overwhelmed,” Daren said.
Then things reached a decisive moment.
“I kept pushing and pushing,” T.J. said. He finally got approval. G.S.
Choi forced the issue at a meeting in Barcelona, going around the
conference table and getting yes votes from all the executives. The voting
concluded with J.K. Shin, who finally conceded to his boss. The deal went
through in May 2012, reportedly for between $50 million and $60 million.
Daren Tsui and Ed Ho now reported to T.J. at the Media Solutions
Center.
“Our goal was to be able to launch the mSpot locker at the time on as