Don’t try to fool Mother Google

Don’t try to pull the tiniest fast one on Google’s acquisitions group—they’ll find out!

Google acquisition chief Salman Ullah said as much at a Monterey, California, conference of venture capitalists and startups last week.

“If you tell us something is black and it turns out it’s white—we get very irritated,” he said at Red Herring Spring on Thursday. “Because we will find out that it’s white during diligence.”

Mr. Ullah said such red flags were deal breakers.

“And we’ve walked from deals when—even though the issue was very tiny, very small, very insignificant—the target has lied to us.”

Would that include the YouTube deal?� Google didn’t exactly set aside—as part of due diligence—$1 billion for Viacom’s lawsuit.