Do you dream of selling a company to Google?

If you're a startup looking for the fabled goldmine of a Google exit, here's the guy you'll want to meet: David Lawee.
The search giant's VP of Corporate Development, along with CEO Larry Page, signs off on the dozens of acquisitions and acqui-hires made every year, large and small. (One got added to the latter category Tuesday: design firm Cuban Council, which will be shipping off a portion of its team to help improve the look of Google+.)
So what does it take to impress Lawee? Well, for one thing, being lucky enough to have a startup that covers a particular area of tech Google is curious about right now (and naturally keeps close to its chest).
"It's like a giant puzzle," Lawee told Mashable, "and we're looking for the missing pieces."
Speaking on stage at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Lawee explained the next steps: be a good cultural fit, be a conscientious worker, and don't think of it as an exit.
"We're trying to find entrepreneurs who are thinking of it as another stage in the company," he said. "We're counting on people to come to Google and take advantage of the opportunity. The product is the star of the show."
Should there be any doubt of that, Google has quite the legacy to point to. There's YouTube, of course — well established in its own right, it rewrote the book on how an acquisition can be run delicately, as a company within a company.
But there's also the satellite-mapping company Keyhole, which in 2003 became the seed that sprouted Google Maps. And maybe you heard of a tiny Linux-based mobile software designer Google bought in 2005, called Android Inc.?
For many startups, the transition isn't a hard sell. "Entrepreneurs who sell to Google are doing it because they have a vision of what they're trying to do," Lawee told attendees. "Very few entrepreneurs get to the stage of creating a billion-dollar company. They're thinking about their legacy."
Going down in Google history is a lure that must be hard to resist. (When it comes to the most famous company that got away, Groupon — which was offered and turned down $6 billion in 2010, and recently fell below that market cap — Lawee refuses to speculate about whether it would have fared better inside the Googleplex.)
But just in case startups feel like haggling, we hear from other conference attendees that Page has to personally approve any change whatsoever in the offer price. In other words, if you don't agree with exactly what Google wants to give you, you'll have to wait in line for one of the world's busiest CEOs to have his next meeting with his acquisitions team.
Do you dream of selling a company to Google? What questions do you have for Lawee? Let us know in the comments.