Founders at Work.pdf

Ron Gruner 443
We realized that we would have to adjust prices. So we sat down and talked
about it and, literally in a day, made the decision to completely restructure our
product line and roll that out pretty quickly. That’s the kind of thing that would
have been difficult to do in a more complex, let’s say, structure.
Livingston: You could be more flexible and move faster.
Gruner: Yes. So we were able to compete with all these startups—almost all of
which went out of business or were acquired. We acquired two, for literally a
penny on the dollar. We acquired one firm that had well over $20 million of
venture capital invested for a few hundred thousand dollars. They just blew up.
Many of these guys got in the business not understanding shareholder communications.
Most importantly, not understanding it’s very much a “people”
kind of business and that investor relations officers are typically “people” kind
of people. Their job is to communicate. So coming in and selling technology—
particularly technology as an unknown—was a very hard sell. They had a hard
time breaking into the market, whereas we had worked a company at a time.
We had had consultants early on that educated us, brought us in to companies,
gave us credibility—kind of put their name on the line after they got to know
us well.
CCBN did well because they were backed by Thomson Financial. Their key
founder, Jeff Parker, had great visibility in that community, and credibility. But
everybody else disappeared.
Livingston: Did you get acquisition offers?
Gruner: We had a number. At one point we had an acquisition offer by a dotcom
whose stock price had gone up by a factor of seven in the prior 3 months.
They gave us an offer at the time that was valued in the tens of millions of
dollars. This was a point where we had revenues of about $3 million. It was
denominated in stock. We thought very seriously about it, but basically got cold
feet—because at that point we had been doing it for 7 years. We just felt, if the
stock collapses, we’ve lost it all.
Nine months later, that stock was worth $205 million! So if we had done the
deal, had I been smart enough to negotiate the deal where we could have
gotten out of the stock, it would have been a $200,000,000 kind of deal.
We had other deals that were a lot less, but we never saw anything that was
the right fit, the right kind of liquidity, and the right kind of chemistry. We
didn’t want to sell the company to somebody that was going to disembowel it.
So that’s why, when we had an offer from NASDAQ—and we had a couple
of offers from them; I can’t talk too specifically about it—we felt that it was the
right strategy. We’ve known the people for a long time; we’ve had marketing
relationships with them; they’re going into corporate services and they’re very
sincere about that. They want to use Shareholder.com as the foundation for
building their corporate services. They’re keeping the name. The valuation was
right. It all happened very quickly.