Silicon Valley's Favorite Bullies

Qatalyst is out to win big M&A deals, not to make friends. 

“The playbook is, we don’t have a playbook”.

- Alex Sherman

George Boutros has heard the stories— the ones rivals tell about how he’s cajoled, bullied, and dissembled his way to the top of the cutthroat business of technology mergers and acquisitions. Boutros doesn’t care. “It’s sour grapes,” he says.

In Silicon Valley dealmaking, few have been as successful—and controversial—as Boutros and his longtime comrade, Frank Quattrone. Over the past eight years, the duo’s boutique advisory firm, Qatalyst Partners, has had the sharpest elbows in the Valley. Its specialty: pushing up prices for companies looking to be sold.

Competitors keep trying to pick apart the firm and discern its methods. Would-be acquirers want to know how to outsmart it. One major Wall Street bank has gone as far as to disseminate a 10-page presentation laying out its ability to counteract Qatalyst, people with knowledge of the matter say. Others have urged corporate buyers to shun the company altogether, those people say. Meg Whitman, chief executive officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, caused a stir in 2015 by refusing to negotiate with Quattrone and Boutros on a deal for Aruba Networks. In an e-mail later made public, an executive working on the deal said Whitman called Boutros “evil.”

A recent decline in acquisition premiums—the value of a deal above the stock market price—suggests the firm may be losing some of its edge. Still, Qatalyst, along with Allen & Co., landed the industry’s biggest deal so far this year, advising LinkedIn on its $26.2 billion sale to