Selling Your Startup

1Seeding What Would Grow into Panthera Advisors

I first dipped my toes into the acquisition world while running my previous company, Onevest, which was backed by 14 different venture capital firms.

Building Onevest was a wild ride—full of terrible lows and exceptionally steep highs—but it became one of the largest communities of entrepreneurs, supporting over 500,000 founders in 234 countries.

Onevest and its portfolio of companies provided services such as cofounder matching, accelerator programs, a vibrant Q&A discussion board, key workshops on everything related to building and scaling businesses, and a platform where investors could meet and invest in startups.

It was a dynamic and deeply loyal community.

Accelerated Growth through Acquisitions

On the journey of building and scaling Onevest, part of its growth was organic, which we absolutely lucked out on, but the other part of its growth was attained through acquiring major competitors in the space.

In total, we acquired three of our direct competitors, which was bold and certainly risky, but it turned out to be a strategic move in the end. Two of those transactions, CoFoundersLab and FounderDating, were purchased in the millions of dollars and were a bit complex, given all the stakeholders who had a hand in the pot.

In one of those deals, we inherited investors who were not very sophisticated in these sorts of deals. A ton of back-and-forth negotiating ultimately shot the billable lawyer hours through the roof.

As ...