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Why founders sell it so early ? If you want to sell it so early why start in the first place ?
by 31reasons 13y ago
Why founders sell it so early ? If you want to sell it so early why start in the first place ?
- noelwelsh 13y agoThere are at least 31 reasons why a founder might sell. Money is a popular one.
- 31reasons 13y agoGood point!
- georgespencer 13y ago> If you want to sell it so early why start in the first place? Uh, what? Are you genuinely suggesting that if your intention is to sell a business quickly, you shouldn't start one to begin with? I.e. "if you want to sell a business, don't start a business." Utter nonsense.
- 31reasons 13y agoyou missed "so early". They could have sold it for twice the price if they grew little bit more and become bigger competitor. Like all decisions, no selling a company is also an investment decision. Do you want to invest in founders who sell within 3 years or someone who grow the company much bigger in 10 or 15 years ? Mark Zuckerberg was offered $1 billion dollar by yahoo when no one even heard of facebook and he declined the offer. If you want to call it "Utter nonsense" its your choice.
- toyg 13y agoYeah, and how much were the Foursquare guys offered at one point? And the various groupon sites? Lots of people end up kicking themselves for not flipping a company when the going was good. Lanyrd has had a good run, all considered.
- larrys 13y agoAgree. Gambling. Ignoring the downside risk of something can be a huge mistake. It's one thing to pass up selling your macbook and oops they just released an updated model now I will get $300 less on ebay. Another thing to pass up a billion dollars for a company no matter what you think the future is. Or for that matter any large amount of money for your company.
- mandeepj 13y agoJust for your note - Yahoo decreased the offer to $700-$800 million after few days and that was one of the reasons why Zuck declined their offer.
- sjtgraham 13y agoThey raised $1.4MM almost exactly two years ago and have a team of six in London. Maybe their options were limited. They deserve our congratulations regardless.
- toyg 13y agoEarly? It's three years almost to the day, for a service which, albeit very nice, was basically without a real monetization strategy (at least from what I saw -- I only attend a couple of conferences per year, so I'm not a heavy user or anything). In Europe, such services tend to die much earlier than what Lanyrd managed. Besides, it makes a lot of sense as an add-on or content-sink for services with a more solid outlook... like Eventbrite. So it's a good move for everyone involved: SimonW and friends get their payout and Eventbrite gets a nice set of features ready to go. Win-win :)