Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
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Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
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Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#2GiftZip is one of the first companies to graduate from the City of East Lansing's technology innovation center (TIC). The TIC also houses The Hatch which is a student incubator run by Michigan State University.
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#3Would be interesting to hear from HNers who made a similar decision to take the money now and how that panned out.
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#4Anyone else who doesn't understand his example? If my company is valued at $1M and someone invests $1M in it, why do I still own 50% of the company after the investment, as the author said? Doesn't this mean the company is actually valued at $2M?
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#5Anyone else who doesn't understand his example? If my company is valued at $1M and someone invests $1M in it, why do I still own 50% of the company after the investment, as the author said? Doesn't this mean the company is actually valued at $2M?
The $1M in the example is the pre-money valuation, $2M is the post-money valuation. If your company is worth $X and I inject $Y into it, it automatically is worth $(X+Y) - there's no question about how you value cash in the bank.
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#6Are those examples at the end his?
He totally dismisses Groupon's rejection of Google's offer, when there were almost certainly some sort of earn-out. I'm sure if Google were offering $8B in cash with no performance requirements, they would have taken the money. But that's not how deals work, and Groupon could very well have decided an IPO would lead to a much surer return.
I would expect a less shallow analysis from a finance guy.
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#7"Too many founders let emotions and egos cloud a decision that is really a number crunch. Once you accept that there will always be richer and wiser people out there, you'll find that they didn't get that way by taking dumb bets."
Maybe I'll always live in a crummy apartment and have Ramen for Thanksgiving but I completely disagree with this. How I choose to spend the next 3 years of my life is hardly just a number crunch. How I spend time doesn't just have a numeric value attached to it. I respect the author's analysis and to each his own. But, for me it's much more about learning, growing and building than a straight math problem. If at the end I don't die with the most toys I'm really OK with that.
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#8Ok, so here's a question I've had for a while. I was wondering if I should do a Ask HN for it, but I'll ask it here for now.
What do you do when offered money for a slightly profitable service that has a small but loyal customer base ? This is in the event that your service will be shut down after acquisition. The math points to taking the deal but it doesn't seem a very nice thing (to me at least) to pull the rug on your customers.
Has anyone had to face decisions of this sort or known someone who has had to ? How did you/they go about it ?
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#9"Too many founders let emotions and egos cloud a decision that is really a number crunch. Once you accept that there will always be richer and wiser people out there, you'll find that they didn't get that way by taking dumb bets." Maybe I'll always live in a crummy apartment and have Ramen for Thanksgiving but I completely disagree with this. How I choose to spend the next 3 years of my life is hardly just a number c…
Well, if you're so inclined you could use part of the 500k to bootstrap another projcet and continue your happy startup existence only with less Ramen. (Unless you just really like Ramen, of course).
Re: Why I decided to take the money and sell my startup
#10"Too many founders let emotions and egos cloud a decision that is really a number crunch. Once you accept that there will always be richer and wiser people out there, you'll find that they didn't get that way by taking dumb bets." Maybe I'll always live in a crummy apartment and have Ramen for Thanksgiving but I completely disagree with this. How I choose to spend the next 3 years of my life is hardly just a number c…
Surely you want to maximize the learning, growing and building, and as such using math would only help.