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Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

derekyan.com

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Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#21

Post by mojuba »

nubg wrote: post #15

> Every inbound deserves respect, even if you think you’re not ready. Because the truth is, readiness in M&A isn’t a moment—it’s a mindset. Dear ChatGPT, please rephrase these bulletpoints into a chapter of my book: ... Pray tell why may we not just read the bulletpoints instead? Sold your own company, but unable to use your own words?

So the market is going to be flooded with this type of soulless books that have no distinct character or style, just pure dry facts?

In a sense, "I wrote a book about it" is disingenuous and I agree the author's bullet list would probably be more interesting and would save us a lot of time.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#22

Post by collingreen »

gbnwl wrote: post #18

I really enjoy the actual content of the few chapters I read so far, but the styling is 100% LLM, and it's so hard to get through multiple pages of the same exact mannerisms repeated over and over and over. It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in o…

> It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post

I didn't realize how poignant of a criticism this could be. Holy hell that hit hard.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#23

Post by sebastiennight »

Centrino wrote: post #8
krater23 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

just download with curl as html

This may help: https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo... Though I'd rather download a PDF or ePub. I would say that the current format is a 'book' in content, but not a 'book' nor an 'e-book' in form, as you can't manipulate it as a single object. But I've seen a few other examples here on HN where people showed off a 'book' purely as a website.

As I shared in a comment above, the book is released under a Creative Commons license that does not authorize sharing derived works so only the original author can distribute you an alternative version

However I vibe-coded this tool for my personal use with our good friend Claude: https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/

Which when pointed at a repository containing an "html book", like https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo...

will give you an ePub with all the content in one place.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#24

Post by Eridrus »

einarvollset wrote: post #2

Great content and perspective. I would say (and fair warning, this is obviously biased as I run one of the investment banks that specialize in B2B SaaS M&A between $2-20M ARR - Discretion Capital), this: "Now should you hire a banker when there is no actionable inbound interest and you have no prior relationships? I would recommend no, as in such a case bankers would typically rely on their network of Corp Devs and p…

What does it take to get a good outcome in the 2-20m ARR exit space?

When I read PE multiples in the 3-5x ARR range, it seems like a fire sale compared to valuation prices. At 3x, you might just be giving it all back in liquidation preferences.

Am I missing something, or is this just founders who are sick of running the business and want to do something else, or are there lots of capital efficient companies in this range where 3-5x revenue is a good deal?

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#25

Post by mrskitch »

jacob_rezi wrote: post #4

Any place to download as a PDF? I think this might be a timely resource

I enjoyed reading the first few chapters, but wanted a PDF as well. I run browserless.io, so threw a quick script together to PDF-ify this. Gist is here: https://gist.github.com/joelgriffith/0e6a2a774317e845206ca8d....

You can pretty much just create a free plan and run this in our debugger, which will compile the chapters and return PDF. Pretty fun little challenge.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#26

Post by Eridrus »

jasonshen wrote: post #6

Really appreciate the deep dive here. M&A is the final boss of startups and so rarely do we get any credible, detailed information about how things go down from the founder's perspective, especially at the 9+ figure deal size. Having written a book about pivots, I know how hard it can be to then distill a grueling experience into something digestible. Thank you Derek!

What makes you think this was a 9 figure deal?

This smells more like a $10-20m deal based on what I could find about his company. I could obviously be wrong, but 100 seems like a real stretch.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#27

Post by Eridrus »

gbnwl wrote: post #18

I really enjoy the actual content of the few chapters I read so far, but the styling is 100% LLM, and it's so hard to get through multiple pages of the same exact mannerisms repeated over and over and over. It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in o…

I dunno how much folks should trust this as more of an account of his specific journey, given this guy apparently didn't do an 83b election and got stuck with a big tax bill (ch 11).

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#28

Post by mrandish »

As a founder fortunate enough to get to and through a positive acquisition, just reading the chapter outline and clicking into a few I can see there's useful perspective here I wish I'd had. Since the situation is pretty rare there's not a lot of info for founders from founders.

As it was I had to figure it out as it happened. I managed to thread the needle while avoiding any major pitfalls but it was a close thing that easily could have blown up. The difference probably came down to some good luck at the right moment, which isn't a great feeling in retrospect.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#29

Post by neilk »

gbnwl wrote: post #18

I really enjoy the actual content of the few chapters I read so far, but the styling is 100% LLM, and it's so hard to get through multiple pages of the same exact mannerisms repeated over and over and over. It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in o…

Yeah this is a bit sad. I think maybe this person actually had some real lived experience and wrote bullet points and then generated the book. I don’t even want to think about the possibility that the whole thing, including anecdotes, might be generated.

I skimmed the content (it has no immediate relevance to my life) but even the chapter headings are sloppadocious.

Re: Show HN: It took 4 years to sell my startup. I wrote a book about it

#30

Post by mck- »

sebastiennight wrote: post #19
jacob_rezi wrote: post #4

Any place to download as a PDF? I think this might be a timely resource

So... the book is released under a Creative Commons license that does not authorize sharing derived works... BUT... If you use this tool I just vibe-coded with our good friend Claude: https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/ And point it at the repository: https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo... It will give you an ePub with all the chapters, including a bit of styling etc. The code is MIT li…

Thank you! This was very helpful :)
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