# 209. The M&A Window You Can’t Afford to Miss ft. Ilya Mikin Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/commerce-untold-6726169/209-the-m-a-window-you-can-t-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/commerce-untold-6726169/209-the-m-a-window-you-can-t-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin.md Podcast: [Commerce Untold](https://stenobird.com/podcast/commerce-untold-6726169) Published: 2026-05-27T12:30:00+00:00 Episode link: https://vimmi.net/mastering-ecommerce-marketing/209-the-ma-window-you-cant-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/c0a806ce-618b-4098-8aad-152db7556b0b.mp3 Processing state: not_requested JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/commerce-untold-6726169/episodes/209-the-m-a-window-you-can-t-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin Duration seconds: 1921 ## Resource Ilya Mikin is Vice President of Technology M&A at Corum Group, one of the leading technology M&A advisory firms globally. His background spans more than two decades across enterprise marketing at Intel and Unilever, executive and CEO roles at companies including iHerb, multiple founder exits across AdTech, MarTech, and FinTech, and now advising founders through acquisitions. He has been on every side of the M&A table, which makes his perspective unusually grounded. This episode gets into what has fundamentally changed about how technology and e-commerce companies are built, valued, and sold. The old playbook of raising VC money, growing at all costs, and gunning for IPO has largely collapsed. What replaced it is a market where M&A has become the primary liquidity event for founders, and where the rules for what makes a company attractive have shifted significantly. Eitan and Ilya dig into what acquirers actually look at today: why NRR, GRR, and low churn have become the cornerstones of valuation, why private equity now represents up to 40-50% of buyers in some sectors, and what it means to be an AI-native company versus an AI-enabled one. They also cover the mechanics of the M&A process itself — the four to eight week preparation phase, how Corum builds competitive tension among buyers, why the narrative around a business often matters more than the financials, and the internal deal killers that founders rarely talk about openly. Ilya also shares his take on where shoppable video sits in a world increasingly shaped by agentic AI, why he believes emotional product categories are protected from agent-driven purchasing, and what he is personally watching in the space. Founders who are building toward an exit, or who have never seriously thought about t… ## Actions - request_transcript: `POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/commerce-untold-6726169/episodes/209-the-m-a-window-you-can-t-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin/transcription-requests` — Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode. - read_markdown: `GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/commerce-untold-6726169/209-the-m-a-window-you-can-t-afford-to-miss-ft-ilya-mikin.md` — Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource. A page view does not enqueue transcription. Agents should invoke `request_transcript` explicitly when they need this episode processed. ## Transcript Full transcripts are not published on public pages unless there is a clear rights basis.