Startup CEO Second Edition Teaser: The Sale Process
As part of the new section on Exits in the Second Edition of the book (order here), there’s a specific chapter around the sale process itself. There are some interesting things in it — the arc and timeline of a deal, working with and through advisors vs. principals dealing with each other directly, optimizing for different stakeholders, and a wonderful long sidebar by my friends and advisors Brian Andersen and Mark Greenbaum from Luma Partners on how to think strategically about an exit and how buyers think. It’s probably worth buying the whole book just for that.
But what I want to write about here is coping with a failed deal – something my team and I unfortunately had to do a couple years before we actually sold the company and something I’ve never written about or discussed publicly.
In 2017, we almost sold Return Path. You hear people talk about that from time to time, and frequently it just means “we had a good offer but decided not to take it.” But in this case, I meant it. We had a good offer. We talked to a couple other potential buyers in the industry and ended up getting a great offer. From a great buyer. We decided to pull the trigger. It was time. We got through the entire deal process, I mean EVERYTHING. Diligence was painful, thorough – and completed. Both sides had signed off on things many times along the way. Documents were done, lawyers had signed off on them, our Board had signed off on them, they had been posted to DocuSign, and our signatures were in escrow. The press release was written and scheduled to go out in less than 48 hours. Our all-hands meeting was scheduled. The acquirer had already sent us their swag to hand out. About 80 people out of 400+ employees at the company knew about it. In the football analogy, we weren’t inside the red zone. We were on the 1-yard line.
Then the call came. “I can’t believe we have to tell you this, but our CEO just decided to pull the plug on this at the last minute.” Buh. Bye. To say this was a disappointment is the understatement of a career.
That evening, I was staying over at a friend’s apartment in Manhattan while Mariquita and the kids were away at the beach with her parents. After the call came in, I grabbed the two other execs who were still in the office, and we went immediately to a bar. That calmed me down a little bit. Then I wandered through Central Park up to the apartment and spent about 4 hours on the phone in a series of cathartic phone calls with the rest of the executive team, some of my closest friends and advisors, and Board members.
The next couple of days were awful. We had to tell a huge number of employees “Uh sorry, just kidding. You know all those stock options that were just about to turn into cash? Sorry. The new company we were all excited to join? Psych!” The worst part was scrambling to turn the already-scheduled all-hands meeting to announce the deal into just another quarterly update. Everyone in the room for that meeting who knew about the failed deal just looked at each other with disbelief. We were still in shock.
Eventually of course, we bounced back. I am now an even more ardent believer in the expression, “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” The company ended up recovering from this and doing a number of things to make us even better in the years that followed, leading to our eventual sale. But I will say, it was just terrible, and nothing about the recovery was easy. I talk about some of the specific steps we took in the book. But mostly, I hope no one ever has to go through anything like this again. This was too big, too close to the end, and too well known. Our team will have deep scar tissue from it for a long time.