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Mark Seneca

Partner

Silicon Valley Office

Mark Seneca is a Corporate partner and co-leads Orrick's M&A and Private Equity Group. He has dedicated his legal career to the M&A specialty, with experience in all aspects of mergers and acquisitions transactions involving both public and private companies in domestic and cross-border deals.

Mark has a particular focus on the technology sector, having led hundreds of buy-side and sell-side transactions involving prominent high-tech serial acquirers, unicorns and venture back companies. His sell-side work involves multiple acquisitions by Google, Facebook, Salesforce.com, VMware, Microsoft, Intel, IBM, Adobe, Yahoo! and Twitter. These deals include his high profile work for Cruise Automation in its acquisition by General Motors, Nest Labs in its US$3.2 billion acquisition by Google, and Instagram in its US$1.0 billion acquisition by Facebook, which was ranked one of the top 10 largest valued private tech M&A deals in the U.S. in 2012. In an interview with Bloomberg Law for a “Rainmakers” episode, Mark provided a substantive analysis of the Instagram deal, including its industry precedent and influence (click here).

On the buy-side, Mark has served as lead M&A counsel for top public company acquirers (Yelp, Google, Yahoo! and Intellisync) as well as private company serial acquirers (Stripe, Pinterest and Social Finance).

  • Mark's recent engagements include:

    • Cruise Automation, autonomous vehicle technology, in its acquisition by General Motors.
    • Nest Labs, manufacturer of the award-winning Learning Thermostat, in its $3.2 billion acquisition by Google.
    • Instagram, provider of a photo sharing mobile application, in its $1 billion sale to Facebook.
    • Multinational technology company, in its acquisitions of Siri, Inc. and WiFiSlam.
    • Yelp Inc., in its sale of Eat24 LLC to GrubHub Inc. and in its acquisition of Turnstyle Analytics Inc., a Toronto-based Wi-Fi marketing company.
    • Stripe, Inc., in multiple acquisitions, including its acquisition of Index Systems, Inc., a point-of-sale software developer.
    • Nervana Systems, Inc., an artificial intelligence and deep learning technology, in its acquisition by Intel
    • Wavefront, Inc., a metrics monitoring and streaming analytics platform, in its acquisition by VMware, Inc.
    • Outward, Inc., an augmented reality 3D imaging company, in its acquisition by Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
    • Neolane S.A., a French software company in the campaign marketing space, in its $600 million acquisition by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
    • EchoSign, a provider of electronic signatures and signature automation technology, in its acquisition by Adobe Systems Incorporated.
    • Pinterest, a social networking site featuring virtual pinboard, in multiple acquisitions.
    • Goodreads Inc., the world’s largest website for readers and book recommendations, in its acquisition by Amazon Inc.