I sold my startup for $25.5 million on Monday just after 2:23 p.m. Pacific Time.
Selling the company, Perfect Audience, to Marin Software took six months of writing carefully worded emails, meeting secretly in cafés, and pacing around the streets of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood after dark.
In the end, I sold Perfect Audience—a software platform which helps small businesses buy online ads—on a phone call on which I barely said anything at all. Our lawyers conferred with their lawyers.
...
One thing that did cut through the exhaustion was a task I’d been anticipating for more than six years: writing the Facebook post in which I announce to friends, former friends, frenemies, ex-girlfriends, college roommates, future wives, and family members that I was not in fact an obscure failure but a new, minor footnote in the annals of Silicon Valley startup successes.
Writing it was easy. I’d had six years to plot it in my head. I kept it simple and tried to strike the right mix between “Aw yeah!” and “Aw shucks!” No one likes a sore winner. I pushed it live and watched as over 400 comments rolled in.
Meanwhile my phone buzzed across my desk as it received text messages from people I’d not heard from in years. The middle school crush. The Sunday school teacher. The startup friends from Chicago. At last!
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-i-sold-my-startup-for-255-million-2014-6
Selling the company, Perfect Audience, to Marin Software took six months of writing carefully worded emails, meeting secretly in cafés, and pacing around the streets of San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood after dark.
In the end, I sold Perfect Audience—a software platform which helps small businesses buy online ads—on a phone call on which I barely said anything at all. Our lawyers conferred with their lawyers.
...
One thing that did cut through the exhaustion was a task I’d been anticipating for more than six years: writing the Facebook post in which I announce to friends, former friends, frenemies, ex-girlfriends, college roommates, future wives, and family members that I was not in fact an obscure failure but a new, minor footnote in the annals of Silicon Valley startup successes.
Writing it was easy. I’d had six years to plot it in my head. I kept it simple and tried to strike the right mix between “Aw yeah!” and “Aw shucks!” No one likes a sore winner. I pushed it live and watched as over 400 comments rolled in.
Meanwhile my phone buzzed across my desk as it received text messages from people I’d not heard from in years. The middle school crush. The Sunday school teacher. The startup friends from Chicago. At last!
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-i-sold-my-startup-for-255-million-2014-6
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