Austin Johnsen leads corporate development at Zapier, where he runs the company’s end-to-end M&A process and oversees the Zapier Fund, an angel-scale vehicle making 10-15 investments a year with a growing portfolio of 40+ companies. His career spans nearly two decades in M&A and investing: he started in investment banking and private equity at Jefferies before moving operator-side, starting with corp dev at Twitter, before leading the function at Twitch (an Amazon company) and Patreon. He writes Artificial Diligence, a biweekly-ish newsletter on the specific, often unglamorous ways AI is and isn’t useful in real M&A work - screening inbounds, running diligence, pressure-testing a thesis, writing the memo, deciding what’s true. Austin earned his MBA from Harvard Business School and has an undergrad degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He lives in Marin and spends most of his free time chasing his three kids.