So there’s one issue a lot of founders struggle with when they finally get a good M&A offer to acquire the company — what about the team?
They didn’t come to join a 10,000+ BigCo. They came to be on the journey. To be Pirates & Romantics. Is it fair to them to sell? Especially if the economics are just “OK” for a lot of them?
It’s a complex issue if you care about the team. I struggled with it. And I often have this discussion with founders when they quietly come to me to talk about selling. I just had one of these conversations last week, in fact.
What I tell them is: first, yes fight for your team. Make sure they have the best offer and situation going in.
But second, if it’s a good deal, and a good acquirer — you just don’t know where it will all go for them.
For our little team at EchoSign / Adobe Sign, now 13 (!) years later:
- They build it to a $200m+ ARR business
- My co-founder and CTO, the most “start-up”-y guy on the team — is still there
- The sales team mostly stayed about 2 years after the acquisition, and then went on to sales leadership roles at Brex, Rippling, Gong, Seismic, Talkdesk, Pipedrive and so many other SaaS leaders
- Several of our top engineers are still at Adobe
So my learning is you just don’t know.
I see this on LinkedIn the other day, one of our DevOps leaders moved on … after 13 years.
Do the right thing by your team. Fight for them. Especially the ones that fought for you.
But if the time has come to sell … if your experience and guy says it’s time … fight for them again. But don’t assume it’s not the journey for them. It might not be. But you might also be surprised.
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Jason Lemkin, Khareem Sudlow
