   Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the man with the acquisition plan.

   Photo by James Martin/CNET

   Anyone who has ever been involved in closing a billion-dollar acquisition
   deal will tell you that you don't go in without a clear, well thought out
   plan.

   Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg knows a thing or two about how to seal the
   deal on blockbuster buys. After all, he's the man behind his company's $19
   billion acquisition of WhatsApp, he personally brokered its $1 billion
   buyout of Instagram and closed the $3 billion deal to buy Oculus VR.

   Zuckerberg offered a primer on the strategies he and his company employ
   when they see an attractive target during testimony Tuesday in a lawsuit
   with ZeniMax Media, which accuses Oculus and Facebook of
   "misappropriating" trade secrets and copyright infringement. At the heart
   of the lawsuit is technology that helped create liftoff for virtual
   reality, one of the hottest gadget trends today.

   A key Facebook approach is building a long-term relationship with your
   target, Zuckerberg said at the trial. These deals don't just pop up over
   night, he said according to a transcript reviewed by Business Insider.
   They take time to cultivate.

     I've been building relationships, at least in Instagram and the WhatsApp
     cases, for years with the founders and the people that are involved in
     these companies, which made [it] so that when it became time or when we
     thought it was the right time to move, we felt like we had a good amount
     of context and had good relationships so that we could move quickly,
     which was competitively important and why a lot of these acquisitions, I
     think, came to us instead of our competitors and ended up being very
     good acquisitions over time that a lot of competitors wished they had
     gotten instead.

   He also stressed the need assure your target that you have a shared vision
   about how you will collaborate after the deal is put to bed. Zuckerberg
   said this was reason Facebook was able to acquire Oculus for less than its
   original $4 billion asking price.

     If this [deal] is going to happen, it's not going to be because we offer
     a lot of money, although we're going to have to offer a fair price for
     the company that is more than what they felt like they could do on their
     own. But they also need to feel like this was actually going to help
     their mission.

   When that doesn't work, Zuckerberg said scare tactics is an effective, if
   undesirable, way of persuading small startups that they face a better
   chance of survival if they have Facebook to guide their way rather than
   going it alone.

     That's less my thing, but I think if you are trying to help convince
     people that they want to join you, helping them understand all the pain
     that they would have to go through to build it out independently is a
     valuable tactic.

   It also pays to be weary of competing suitors for your startup, Zuckerberg
   said, and be willing to move fast to stave off rivals and get the deal
   done.

     Often, if a company knows we're offering something, they will offer
     more. So being able to move quickly not only increases our chance of
     being able to get a deal done if we want to, but it makes it so we don't
     have end up having to pay a lot more because the process drags out.

   It wasn't clear why these strategies didn't work on Snapchat CEO Evan
   Spiegel, who famously rebuffed a $3 billion takeover offer from Facebook
   in 2013.

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