A founder explains why the best time to sell a startup is right after an IPO, when the buyer has liquid shares to spend. He describes a dinner organized by Ann Riesen that brought together ad-tech players and potential acquirers, where he pitched his company and got on the radar of major native-ads players.
If you want to sell a company to a larger company, I think the best time to do it is just after the IPO. After you IPO, you have this like new currency of shares that you can just issue and get essentially free money that you can spend on new acquisitions. And that's exactly what was going on in Twitter. So one day, I literally get an email from partner Ann Riesen, and she says, we have this thing tomorrow at 5 PM. And it's going to be all the ad tech experts from all of these like large companies. Companies. And so of course I said yes. And so I'm sitting there with like all of the potential acquirers for, for our company. I spent the next 24 hours before this event actually started coming up with like just a couple of smart things to say. And by the end of this dinner, I ran out of all my smart things, but I didn't get any more questions. Suddenly we were like very much on the radar of these larger companies as one of the players in this emerging field of native ads.
