Founders at Work.pdf

Mark Fletcher 243
been 2 weeks since we’ve been in the Wall Street Journal. When are we going
to be in again?” And she said, “Don’t you dare expect this kind of stuff forever.”
So you have to figure out when is the right time to sell, what you want out of
an acquisition—both in terms of money and whether you want to stay on.
Would you be happy with somebody else running the company? It’s a very personal
decision. And there are better times to sell than others. If nobody is talking
to you, it’s going to be hard to set up an auction and you’re not going to get
much money and you’re not going to be happy about it.
I think those are the main things. Then, in terms of selecting a banker, it’s
“Who are you comfortable with; who understands your company?” One of the
investment bankers I talked to had no clue what we did, didn’t do any research
to figure out what we did and was just unresponsive. Well, how is somebody,
who is essentially going to be your representative, going to make a good sale of
your company if they don’t know what you do?
Livingston: You were acquired by Yahoo and Ask. How does life change once
you become part of these big companies?
Fletcher: There were differences. With Yahoo, I left at the acquisition, so I was
never a part of Yahoo. With Ask, I stuck around for 14 months. Not that it
was contingent on the acquisition in any way, it was just the right thing to do. If
you compare the two companies . . . when eGroups was acquired by Yahoo, we
were 150 people. I essentially hadn’t played in the code base in a year, I wasn’t
running day-to-day operations, so it was very easy for me to go away. At the
acquisition by Ask, there were two of us going over. It wouldn’t be right, regardless
of anything else, for me to leave. I wanted to make sure that the acquisition
was viewed as a success for Ask 1 year later—5 years later, even. I’ve learned
that your reputation is very important, as an entrepreneur, as a tech guy in the
Valley, and it’s a good thing to worry about your reputation. I was very concerned
about that, and so, when only two people are coming over—and most of
the knowledge was still in my head—it wouldn’t have been right for me to
leave. So that’s why I stuck around for a while, helped build up a team, made
sure that the knowledge in my head was transferred to all of these other people,
and that, when I did leave, the place wouldn’t fall apart.
Livingston: You said you started to get acquisitions offers very early on with
ONElist. Is it hard to turn these down?
Fletcher: Sure. It’s very flattering to have some company come up and start
schmoozing you. It comes down to you have to figure out what you want to do
with your startup and your life. With ONElist, it was very easy—I didn’t even
have to make the decision just to keep going as long as I could, because I knew
I was creating all this value from the users. Otherwise it just comes down to the
intangibles I guess. If you like the people you’re talking to, if you think you’re
getting a decent deal. But what is a decent deal? It’s the most money you can
get, right? But what is that? Nobody knows.
Livingston: It’s a confusing situation for a lot of founders.