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A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indic

by ar7hur 12y ago

A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indication is just crazy. I strongly recommend this excellent post from Justin Kan: http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-company http://justinkan.com/the-founders-guide-to-selling-your-comp...

vikramhaer 12y ago
Agree that bullshit offers need to be weeded out, but I don't think it would make sense for an Acquiror to propose a price without sufficient information to base that price on. Justin's post mentions bullshit offers as not putting time pressure or promise of term sheet delivery, but the email indicates they're interested in getting it done as soon as possible. Hard to say if this really was a bullshit offer, but don't think an indication of price through an email, especially prior to an NDA, would make sense.
charlesdm 12y ago
Don't agree. There are so many variables to consider, that one usually needs more information to get a good understanding of a business and to understand where the value creation is happening. That obviously doesn't mean you need to hand out proprietary information to everyone who is going on a fishing expedition, but not doing so will absolutely kill any deal before it's even put together. Consider the following: how would you value a business, if you don't know how it is structured, how it operates, and how much revenues and profits it's generating? I can potentially see that working for some cool technology startup, or an acqui-hire, but not for an actual business with revenues (and more importantly, profits). Those small acquisitions, they're not investments for Google, they're expenses. The $500m-$1bn+ ones, those are investments. Big difference in thinking.
jber 12y ago
Right. We negociated that the day after. They wanted to buy the 1 year old company (3 people) for $10M
lsc 12y ago
>A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indication is just crazy. I... don't know? I know at the low end, you are completely correct. If I had a nickle every time someone wanted to buy prgmr.com for the ebay value of the servers, well, I'd be able to buy another server or two. I ended up being pretty free with my revenue numbers... and yeah, most people are just sniffing. I guess I wasn't much of a business person, so i didn't really understand (still don't, really) why those should be super secret. But on the high end, I would assume (and again, zero experience on the high end) I would assume that if it were worth google's lawyer time to set up the deal that they would come out with a price that was, you know, significant money by my own standards.

by ar7hur 12y ago

vikramhaer 12y ago

Agree that bullshit offers need to be weeded out, but I don't think it would make sense for an Acquiror to propose a price without sufficient information to base that price on. Justin's post mentions bullshit offers as not putting time pressure or promise of term sheet delivery, but the email indicates they're interested in getting it done as soon as possible. Hard to say if this really was a bullshit offer, but don't think an indication of price through an email, especially prior to an NDA, would make sense.

charlesdm 12y ago

Don't agree. There are so many variables to consider, that one usually needs more information to get a good understanding of a business and to understand where the value creation is happening. That obviously doesn't mean you need to hand out proprietary information to everyone who is going on a fishing expedition, but not doing so will absolutely kill any deal before it's even put together. Consider the following: how would you value a business, if you don't know how it is structured, how it operates, and how much revenues and profits it's generating? I can potentially see that working for some cool technology startup, or an acqui-hire, but not for an actual business with revenues (and more importantly, profits). Those small acquisitions, they're not investments for Google, they're expenses. The $500m-$1bn+ ones, those are investments. Big difference in thinking.

jber 12y ago

Right. We negociated that the day after. They wanted to buy the 1 year old company (3 people) for $10M

lsc 12y ago

>A good reminder that an "acquisition proposal" without any indication of price is not an acquisition proposal. Asking so much information without any such indication is just crazy. I... don't know? I know at the low end, you are completely correct. If I had a nickle every time someone wanted to buy prgmr.com for the ebay value of the servers, well, I'd be able to buy another server or two. I ended up being pretty free with my revenue numbers... and yeah, most people are just sniffing. I guess I wasn't much of a business person, so i didn't really understand (still don't, really) why those should be super secret. But on the high end, I would assume (and again, zero experience on the high end) I would assume that if it were worth google's lawyer time to set up the deal that they would come out with a price that was, you know, significant money by my own standards.