61–70 of 244 posts
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One way I've heard the role of product manager described as is a "shit umbrella".
This is applied to managers in general: - Good managers are shit umbrellas - Bad managers are shit funnels
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Could you provide examples of that?
Jeffrey Kaplan, in his book "Start Up", would talk about how Microsoft would do this in the days when it was particularly powerful. Think about it this way: You always want to learn about opportunities and potential competitors. The biz dev team may say, hey we should maybe acquire this company, and the product people may say, no this is a good idea but we should copy it. It doesn't have to stem from a sinister inten…
Hearing many horror stories over backing out at last minute, I wonder why breakup fees and escrow are not more popular in startup world. E.g. if you would like to acquire for $5mln you need to deposit $100k. If you walk out, this is a breakup fee. If startup bails it also have to pay same amount to the acquire.
I've seen million dollar deposits get forfeited, people are insane! It might honestly be a good business model on its own.
Hearing many horror stories over backing out at last minute, I wonder why breakup fees and escrow are not more popular in startup world. E.g. if you would like to acquire for $5mln you need to deposit $100k. If you walk out, this is a breakup fee. If startup bails it also have to pay same amount to the acquire.
A company sales can go wrong for many reasons, how do you differentiate between a legitimate reason to not proceed to the sale and a "last minute backing out"? I assume that's what a LOI (which is all that the founder had) is for: it comes before any legally binding agreements and allows both parties to be sure they get what they want without bad surprises.
Same thing happen to me. Only it was 2 mil instead of 5 and I did not really have to do any due diligence as I was selling my product, not my company. So other then spending some time and paying couple of grand to have lawyer go over the agreements I did not suffer much. But boy, was I disappointed ;(
This is very painful to hear. I've tried selling my main company to 4 different buyers now... every single time we get past the LOI phase, they see all our financials in plain sight, and there's always some stupid hangup/ghosting/sketchiness exactly like in this article. Very disappointing, considering how transparent we are up front sending every financial, and there's no real 'discoveries' later that would change t…
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An investment bank?
My lower class upbringing is showing, is that what an investment bank does?
There's got to be a business in here somewhere. A company that acts as a middleman that sorts through all your financials for you, does all the communicating, drafts all legal paperwork and just gives you quick regular updates through the process. That way you can keep running your company during all of this madness. I wish I knew more about selling and acquiring companies since it seems like a business well worth la…
The executive team has to be very involved in the process. Their involvement naturally drags management/staff into it.
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Sure, Amazon does it all the time to small startups. They fly you into Seattle, setup a fancy meeting with strategy teams and M&A, make you run through a pitch deck, explain every aspect of your business. They take diligent notes until they fully understand your inner workings, they tell you thanks, you'll hear from us soon. And nothing happens, 6 months later AWS launches your exact product. Founders need to be extr…
Why don't companies go in with something akin to an NDA saying you can't use any of this information to directly compete with us for x years? Seems like this would be standard if it's common practice to steal businesses while feigning interesting in acquisition.
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Sure, Amazon does it all the time to small startups. They fly you into Seattle, setup a fancy meeting with strategy teams and M&A, make you run through a pitch deck, explain every aspect of your business. They take diligent notes until they fully understand your inner workings, they tell you thanks, you'll hear from us soon. And nothing happens, 6 months later AWS launches your exact product. Founders need to be extr…
This is not an example. This is an explanation of how it could happen. Can you share an actual case? Such as, a startup that went through this.