Hey HN, Justin here (the post's original author). Didn't expect this to get posted again. I'm happy to answer any questions here about selling your company.<p>I recently started a new company, Atrium, aiming to make legal services (such as M&A) for startups and tech companies easier as well.
I've read this a few times and having been through up and down periods it's clear that the most important part of this, is the following:<p><i>The best time to sell your startup is when you have many options.</i><p>It needs to be really emphasized that this is a <i>very</i> rare place for the vast majority of startups. That means this advice isn't generally applicable.<p>Which brings up the implicit question, why would you decide to sell your startup if you are clearly winning and growing at the pace that you can build a sellers market?<p>There are a lot of really good reasons you would, but I think all of them come down to: At some point you won't be able to be competitive in the market without the resources of a larger company. Whether that means you'll never be able get to an IPO, or you'll get out competed between now and then.<p>I've never read a good rundown of WHY they decided to sell, Twitch or otherwise.<p>So it's really a question of when, not if. Opportunities to sell will come in waves over time so how do you know which one you should take because it's possible to overshoot and then the whole thing goes bust (Digg, Foursquare etc...).<p>What I'd be interested in is the Founders guide to selling your company when it has relatively few options. That's the more common case, and one that where I think the opportunities there are missed by most founders. I never read stories about that, I've only read "we were on track to a billion in revenue and sold."
Great article and insight into a somewhat opaque process.<p>I sold my company in 2014 and the biggest surprise to me was how long and time consuming the process was. It really impaired my ability to run the company as efficiently as I would have liked during the transition process. And the stress of having to meet with buyers, but not being able to fully communicate the scope of the meetings to the team until the appropriate time was significant.
At the time of its sale to Amazon, I remember wondering how twitch could only be worth 1 billion compared to something like WhatsApp being worth 20 billion. It was purely from an engineering standpoint that I considered what twitch was doing to be vastly more impressive. It's three years later and Amazon hasn't been too overbearing with the changes they've made, but I wonder if JKan believes he got fair value for his company?
I've worked in software M&A advisory for 3 years now. This is an awesome guide. Anyone looking for professional advice (go beyond just reading blog posts and internet material) on this type of thing, feel free to reach out. Happy to speak for free initially and point in the right direction.
> A company’s financial value hinges on its profits and model of its future cash flows. For the vast majority of startups in tech, this will be zero.<p>I’m not sure just how true that is today. In my YC batch probably 30%? of companies were profitable or at least eying profitability.<p>I’d actually be very curious to know what those numbers are.
Justin - you mentioned that investments bankers take 1-2% of the selling price. What percentage do all the rest of the closing costs take up (lawyers, etc)? What are these other closing costs?