$300,000 went to the team. All team members who had stock options got the full value of their options and then folks who didn't have options (we stopped issuing options a couple of years ago) received a bonus based on time with the company.
I won't speak directly for them, but I'll say they're some of the most founder-friendly VCs I've ever interacted with.
They made an exceptionally generous decision and any founder would be lucky to work w/ them.
4/ What are you doing next?
No plans! I will say I have no interest in doing anything directly related to software for the foreseeable future and have no plans of starting any new businesses anytime soon (if ever).
5/ What will you do with the money?
Only major plan is to pay off the house. Working with a great financial advisor to make sure we save/spend/invest wisely.
No massive purchases or investments planned. Super boring. :)
6/ Why not hire a CEO?
Explored this, but wouldn't have given the financial freedom + mental break I needed.
I'd have need to go find a new source of income, plus the outcome of the company would then be in someone else's hands.
That's MORE stress...not less.
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I'd LOVE an macOS/iOS/iPadOS-native take on this space.
I feel like humanity is ready for the kind of app that offers more than the overly-structured typical word processing/spreadsheet software, but not at the expense of speed.
Folks throw out so many "better alternatives" to Notion, but they're almost always extremely text-focused or spreadsheet-focused, which is just polishing the same 💩.
1/ Last year I failed to sell Baremetrics for $5m, but I learned a ton, and one of those things was the world of asset sales & stock sales.
This is about to get real nerdy but this is crucial if you’re trying to sell a company. It could literally save you millions of dollars.
2/ Depending on how your company is set up, you’ll have the option to do an asset sale or a stock sale.
In an asset sale, you’re selling the assets of the company as opposed to the company itself.
3/ In a stock sale, you’re selling stock that the company has issued and generally you’re selling the majority of the stock such that the buyer controls the company thanks to their majority share.
You’re basically selling off ownership of the company.
1/ One of the biggest misconceptions I see from first-time founders is what multiples they could sell their company for.
So, let's talk about that a bit, in an effort to downplay the notion that you'll get filthy rich from your company.
2/ I'm going to overgeneralize some things here, for the sake of brevity. Yes, I understand there are always exceptions, but chances are you aren't it.
First up, let's talk about the reasons someone buys a company.
3/
1. Flipping 2. Revenue 3. Acquihire 4. Strategic
Again, there are other reasons, but those are the big ones.
2/ In 2018 we launched a product called Baremetrics Intros, which essentially helped companies and investors find each other based on their actual data instead of just who they knew. Three months later…we shut it down.
3/ It was, commercially, a failure. We just couldn’t get any investors (our target) to fork over any cash. We opted to shut it down instead of going deeper down an already risky rabbit hole.
1/ Story time on one of my biggest professional regrets.
Back in 2006, I was deep in the freelance world, doing UI design for all sorts of companies.
Somehow, Adobe ended up reaching out to me to do some exploratory UI work for a mobile design product they were working on.
2/ I was a year out of design school and had been freelancing full-time for just a few months. I was nervous working with a company that large...especially one so well known in the design world.
3/ Obviously it was very flattering that they wanted to work with me, but I had a debilitating case of imposter syndrome. I was in my early 20's working with folks who'd been in the industry for decades.
1/ Underutilized practice for staying sane: blocking.
Blocking accounts on social media. Blocking keywords. Blocking email addresses. Blocking calls.
No one has a *right* to your attention. Ever.
2/ With social media, I block/mute all sorts of keywords to keep my timeline clean. I'm also incredibly quick to block accounts of people who clearly have no interest in civil conversation.
3/ With email, if I get a single cold sales email, I block the entire company domain from ever emailing me again.
I'd have hundreds if not thousands of sales emails (and sales email followups) every day if I didn't cut that junk off at the start.