How I Sold My Company to Twitter, Went to Facebook, and Screwed My Co-Founders
In this 2016 acquisition retrospective, @taigeair reflects on the journey of bootstrapping and successfully selling their business.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Unsolicited buyer inquiries versus running a deliberate auction process require very different negotiation leverage.
Bootstrapping for years without external capital provides extreme freedom, but exits are often triggered by energy depletion as much as financial gain.
Retaining ownership of code and operations creates pride, but transitioning to an acquirer requires letting go of absolute autonomy.
Community Debate Themes:
Hacker News peers debated transaction structures (cash vs earnout), founder tax strategies, and life after liquidating a long-term indie asset.
CATEGORY Startup Exits →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE ★ 49 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 22 comments
I read the book. He seems like an extremely unlikable guy, what with all his cheesy pick-up stories and his hatred of ad-blockers.
However, all-in-all, it was a great read. I liked his take on Zuckerberg thinking of himself as Alexander -- "Google delenda est" -- or the vignette where the Facebook VP asked "What is Facebook?", and the perky-possibly-a-plant intern responded "it's not your social network, it's your personal newspaper!".
It's worth trudging through the annoying self-promoting stuff for the insider takes imo.
So the screw over was that the company fetched 5 million instead of 10?
Assuming a 3-way split, 1.66 million versus 3.33 million each? He had to take a least a million dollar hit in that scenario, or did Facebook give him something else besides a job? Is a job at Facebook worth over a half a million dollars?
"Products that cause mothers to murder their infants in order to use them more, assuming they’re legal, simply cannot fail in the world."
All this is perfectly normal. Somehow.
Why is a job at FB worth more than a ~$10M acquisition?
Isn't this a dupe? I seem to recall reading it.