SaaStr 736: What I Learned Selling My Company for $130M with Harry Glaser Founder of Periscope Data and ModelBit

Primary Topic

This episode delves into the intricacies and personal experiences of Harry Glaser during the sale of his company, Periscope Data, for $130 million.

Episode Summary

In this revealing SaaStr podcast, Harry Glaser shares the lessons learned from selling Periscope Data for $130 million and navigating the complexities of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). He highlights the often misunderstood dynamics of how M&A deals unfold and the strategic positioning necessary for companies to become attractive acquisition targets. Glaser discusses the emotional and operational challenges founders face during and after the acquisition process, emphasizing the importance of building relationships with key decision-makers in potential acquirer companies. He candidly shares the mistakes and realities of selling a business, providing a unique insider’s perspective on the impact of these decisions on both personal lives and company futures.

Main Takeaways

  1. M&A offers come unexpectedly and are driven by the acquirer's strategic needs.
  2. Building relationships with key corporate figures is crucial for facilitating acquisition offers.
  3. The negotiation process is intense, with significant power dynamics at play.
  4. Founders must manage both the emotional impact and operational challenges post-sale.
  5. The importance of maintaining integrity and fulfilling promises to shareholders and employees.

Episode Chapters

1. Introduction to M&A Dynamics

Glaser outlines the misconceptions about M&A and the strategic positioning needed for companies to be attractive acquisition targets. Harry Glaser: "Tech companies are bought, not sold."

2. Personal Journey and Lessons

Discussion on the emotional and professional journey through the sale and the subsequent integration period at the acquiring company. Harry Glaser: "I sprinted towards the close date, then faced a stressful couple of years."

3. Navigating Negotiations

Insights into the negotiation process, emphasizing the need for preparation and strategic use of leverage. Harry Glaser: "You need to be trusted...negotiation around a nine-figure M&A is really hard."

4. Aftermath and Long-term Impacts

Glaser reflects on the long-term effects of M&A on personal life, professional reputation, and the operational health of the acquired company. Harry Glaser: "You're delivering a lot of value to the acquirer, even if they screw it up."

Actionable Advice

  1. Understand the M&A landscape: Educate yourself on the dynamics and processes involved in mergers and acquisitions.
  2. Build strategic relationships: Cultivate connections with key people in potential acquirer companies.
  3. Prepare for intense negotiations: Equip yourself with knowledge and strategies to handle high-stakes discussions.
  4. Manage expectations post-sale: Be realistic about the changes and challenges post-acquisition.
  5. Maintain integrity: Always honor commitments to stakeholders during and after the sale process.

About This Episode

Harry Glaser was the co-founder and CEO of Periscope Data, which raised a seed round before finding customers, yet didn’t run out of money before becoming an overnight success 3-4 years later. They grew like crazy when they found product-market-fit and raised a big Series A and B.
When you’re growing fast, everything can feel like it’s breaking constantly, and you’re hiring and rehiring people fast. During those rapid growth years, someone would reach out every once in a while and ask if Harry would consider selling. He always said no.

But then growth flatlined for a couple of years, and it was time to talk about selling. From the start of the company to a couple of years after being acquired, it was about a ten-year journey altogether.

In today's episode, Harry shares the honest truth and lessons learned from selling Periscope Data for $130M.

People

Harry Glaser

Companies

Periscope Data, ModelBit

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Transcript

Jason Lemkin
Welcome to the official Sastr podcast, where you can hear some of the best SASTR speakers. This is where the cloud meets.

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Harry Glaser
So real quick. This is me. I'm the co founder and CEO of Modelbit. If you're familiar with mlops, it's like Sagemaker, but way better, but more relevant to this discussion. I was the co founder and CEO of Periscope Data.

Periscope data I ran for the better part of a decade before finally selling it, and the journey at Periscope data basically looked like this. There were about three or four years before we were an overnight success where at some point in there we raised a seed round but didn't really help us find customers. And so we still didn't have very many customers for several years, but we managed to not run out of money until we got to product market fit. And then we started, everyone had heard of us. We started growing crazy.

We raised this big series a, then we raised this big series b. I would describe my mental state during those sort of couple of years of very rapid growth as, oh, God. Like just the whole, everything feels like it's breaking constantly. You just hired the team. Now you have to rehire the team.

All these various problems that you get from having this big headcount, all this kind of stuff. And then growth flatlined. And there's lots to be talked about why that happened and how to avoid that. But that's not the topic for today. During the rapid growth years, every once in a while, some company would reach out and they'd be like, hey, would you ever consider selling?

And I'd say, like, I'm king of the world. This is awesome. I don't want to sell. And then after growth is flatlined for a couple of years, and you're really a stress ball trying to fix that. When a company does reach out and says, hey, would you be interested in selling?

You go, actually, let's maybe talk about that. And so that was my journey, including the couple of years that I was required to spend at the acquirer. It was about a ten year journey. And there's a lot to talk about. But in particular, the point I want to make is people misunderstand how m and a happens and why it happens and what causes it to happen versus not happen.

And so here's my lessons and what I am doing differently the second time around, having been through this drama. And so we'll talk about how M and a offers even happen. Where do they come from? Why do people make acquisition offers? I'm not talking about acquihires, which is mostly about saving face.

Often money doesn't really even change hands in an acquihire. Also not talking about the multi billion dollar mergers or whatever. I'm talking about your 50 to 500 million bread and butter sort of classic startup exit. And then we're going to talk about the process once you get the offer, because there's a lot that happens quickly and there's a big information imbalance between the acquirer, which has a whole team called Corp dev, which knows exactly what they're doing, and you with your one finance person and your external law firm trying to figure out how this all works. And then we'll talk about some life lessons at the end that sort of I came away with, so let's get into it.

M and a offers, how do they happen? Where do they come from? So a couple of things to just get out of the way. And these are lessons I learned from writing about this on the Internet, because then people would start to call me and go, oh great, I want to build my company to sell. How do we do that?

Or hey, actually I think I'm ready to sell my company now. Bad news. That's not how this works. There's an old adage, and you'll hear this from bankers, especially tech companies are not sold, they are bought. That is true.

So what we are basically doing here is positioning the company such that you havent created a situation where it cant be acquired, that can happen, and where you have the requisite relationships where an offer, if they make it, is likely to be successful. But thats the best you can do. So what we are doing is positioning the company so that its growing for the long term and its a great startup and its position to maybe get a great IPO one day. But also if you were to get an offer, you're in a position to consider it and not that's too late or you've screwed this up somehow. Offers come when they come is the first lesson and we'll talk about what has happened such that they create the company.

But what you really want to be doing here is growing the company for the long run, not deciding in a moment that you want to sell the company. If you were to simply pick up the phone and call acquirers, you would lose all their leverage and you would be positioned internally at the acquirer as this company is looking for a fire sale. So we can probably get a really good deal. That's not what you want to have happen. What you want to have happen instead is, hey, I am clearly just growing this company and you called me so we can talk about it because you called me.

But that's where we are. Most important to probably understand is who is it that actually decides to acquire the company? Because oftentimes you get this reach out from a function called corporate development. Corporate development executes deals and as part of executing deals they are responsible for having relationships with all the relevant companies in the space. So they will frequently call you.

And it's not a bad relationship to have. It's not bad to answer the phone or get to know those people, but just understand that they are at the deal size you want, not the tiny deal size. They are the deal executors and not the deal creators. And at big tech, like a company like a Microsoft or a meta or a Google Alphabet is organized into business units. So our second face on the slide here is Adam Masseri.

He's the head of the business unit for Instagram and threads at Meta. Third person on the slide here, Susan Wojcicki, who is, or I think maybe was the head of the YouTube business unit at Google. First one is Thomas Curry and head of the Google cloud business unit at Google. These are the people who will, if you have a cloud SaaS software company, the person at Google who will decide, I really need that one. The person at Google who decided to acquire looker is going to be Thomas Kurian.

The person at Instagram or at Facebook who decides to acquire an Instagram competitor before it's a threat to them will be Adam. Right? And so these are the people that you're eventually going to want to get to know and have a personal relationship with. Similar. And I'm thinking when I think of pre or post IPo tech I've got here on here, like Zoom and Snowflake and canva and Stripe are some of the companies just represented here and often the CEO for sure will be a decider.

And then sometimes also there's a relatively powerful chief product officer who will be the holder of the product strategy, and we'll know, okay, we're not moving into machine learning fast enough. We're going to need to make a machine learning acquisition, something like that. So it's worth understanding that these are the people who initiate the big offers, and this is a longer term strategic play. But you're going to want to find a way to build relationships with these humans. In particular, the reason that somebody in that position, the head of the business unit or the CEO of a smaller but still large tech company, makes an offer is because something happened to them internally that's put them on their back foot.

A really clear example would be Adobe and Figma, where they are just, this looks like the way the industry is going and they are behind the eight ball in terms of where the industry is going and they're getting beat. And in particular, it's usually optical because they feel personally like they need to make a change, a splashy move that resets the narrative. So they might be in a position where they've missed a couple quarters in a row, and now they are in a position where the street thinks that they are missing, their stock price is threatened, and they need to turn around and show the street, no, I've got an ace up my sleeve. Or maybe Google would be a good example of OpenAI's relentless pace of launches is threatening Google's brand of being the most innovative in technology and these kind of advanced AI machine learning technologies. And so now someone needs to make a splashy move at Google, or the CEO of Google, or the board of Google is going to go, you were in charge of maintaining our lead in machine learning, and you failed.

It's important to understand that these are the humans and these are the kinds of things that happen to them that make them reach out. And because you have that relationship, you will be front of mind when they decide to reach out. But what happened to me, and what may happen to you too, is this person just, they know you already. They think of you as a leader and innovator in this space, and they go, oh, shit, I've got to make a splashy move. And they just text you one day and go, can we get lunch?

And you go to lunch and you go, what's up, man? And they go, have you considered deepening our partnership into something more strategic and long term? And that's how this happens. Right. And so what you're doing until that happens is positioning yourself and building that relationship.

So I think we've covered some of this already, but you want to be front of mind for them when they think that they need to make that move. You need to be trusted. The negotiation around a big, let's say nine figure m and a is really hard and has a lot of tense moments and they need to trust you. You cannot get from zero to a nine figure m and a offer in terms of your relationship all in one process. So there needs to already be a well of trust.

And then what I would say is put yourself in this position and then continue growing your business and the offers will come when they come. Last thing and this is how companies accidentally put themselves in a position where they cant get an offer that they might want to get. Im oversimplifying here. We can get into this in Q and a if people are curious. But in general your post money valuation is a hard floor on a good acquisition price.

And because its a post money valuation, because its a hard floor on a good acquisition price, often acquirers simply wont make an offer that is below your post money valuation because they understand that it's going to be complex for the board to accept it. They understand that they're offering VC's less than a dollar on their investment and therefore the VC's might get pissed off and these acquirers want their relationship with these VC's so they might just not make an offer. Even if they do make an offer that's under your post money valuation is bad news for somebody. Employees might get less than a dollar for each dollar that they have on the cap table, the VC's might, somebody might get zero. It might be bad news for everybody.

So if you're growing like crazy and you've earned that valuation and it's a reasonable multiple on your ARR, take it, because again, we're shooting for the moon here. We're building startups, let's go. But if you are offered that money for some other reason, maybe the macro market was crazy. Give me AI company and you can take any valuation you want. Maybe it's your personal brand or something like that.

Maybe it's a not so good VC. Just stop and realize what's happening. If you think $100 million acquisition would be a good idea and be a good outcome for everyone, but you're being offered a $200 million valuation, what you are doing is essentially walking away from $100 million acquisition in that moment. So think hard about whether you want to do I'm not saying no again, but I'm saying that is one of the considerations that goes into raising a big round. It's a double or nothing decision.

All right, so that's where these offers come from. Now I'm going to talk about the process.

They've decided, oh, God, I've got to make a splashy move. They've decided, I'm going to put this offer down. What happens now? So here's the timeline, from initial interest to closing. For me, this was about six months, December to May, in the entire process.

And I would say the letter of intent came, not sure if I remember now, but it would be late March, early April. So towards the end of the process. So the initial interest comes with, want to get lunch? Then there's getting to know you, then there's talking about what an offer might look like. There's maybe getting to know a few folks on either side on the team.

Everybody's getting comfortable with each other, and at some point, people are going to start to throw out, here's what the offer would look like, and numbers. And as we converge on that, there's a document, it's very much like a term sheet in a fundraising called a letter of intent. A couple pages describing the high level terms. Most important thing to understand about the letter of intent is it makes the process exclusive. It means that you are not going to engage in acquisition talks with anyone else, and that means that they have all the leverage in this process.

So you are going to want to get all of the negotiation done that you care about before you sign the letter of intent. So let's walk through this. So what's going to happen at the beginning is they're going to say something vague, and you're going to say something like, I see your point, and that is compelling. And I hadn't considered that. We're growing for the long run here, and I don't know.

Right. You don't want to just give it all up in the first meeting. You want to play a little hard to get. You'll have a relationship at this point, so you'll know what you're doing. But also, well before the letter of intent part, you are going to want to leverage the other relationships that you have been building here.

So they're going to reach out to you and they're going to say, would you be interested? And you'll do a couple back and forth to see if this is real. But then at that point, you're going to want to call up your other contacts who might also make offers, and you're going to want to just tell them as a courtesy, not that you're looking to get acquired, but hey, I would always want you to hear it from me first, that we have had some interest, and I don't know if it's real, and I don't even know if I want it to be real, but I would never want you to find out from the press or from someone else, not me. So I'm just telling you as a courtesy and as transparency. And that will, if they are interested in making a move at that point, cause them to run their own internal processes to see if they can generate terms as well.

Obviously, just like any negotiation, having multiple offers is the best place from which you can generate a competitive dynamic. They will also. These folks all talk to each other once they start asking their corp dev teams to start drafting. Lois, the corp dev teams all talk to each other. Sometimes it feels like they're in a group chat.

And so at that point, even if only the original offeror makes a firm offer, which is what happened to me, they'll notice that you're shopping it a little bit and you're just being courteous. So that's okay. And that will create at least the perception of a competitive dynamic, which is helpful for you.

This is also an important dynamic to understand because it's very different from fundraising. In fundraising, I would say you get a term sheet, you sign a term sheet. The reasons that a term sheet doesn't close are one the VC discovers something in diligence where they think you were literally lying to them, whether you were or not. Like something like literally you said x in the pitch deck and now that I have access to the data room, not x is true, or there's some foundational shift, a big macro market change, svb collapse, things of that nature. COVID I heard of some term sheets getting broken during COVID like literally that week of March 2020 that I think is maybe a little understandable.

I also heard of VC's keeping their word during that week, which you love to see. But aside from that, VC term sheets from Honorable VC's close, generally speaking. Lois from acquirers generally don't close. I was told by our legal team that 50% close rate is what they see. Having been through the process, I'm honestly surprised it's less.

It's not less. Excuse me. I think it might be less. And what you have to understand and what informs the process as you go through it is even though this seems really intense, and also even though you're starting to make your peace with the fact that you might lose your baby, but at least you might retire to the beach. This is probably not happening.

And you have to keep that in the back of your head. You have to keep running the business, and we'll talk more about that. Another dynamic you have to understand, like I said, the Loi gives the acquirer exclusivity. So you're about to enter into a position where, a, you're not talking to anyone else about M and A, but also b, you're probably not selling to this company, because, remember, less than 50% chance of closing. It's a pretty tough place to be.

So if the LoI doesn't specify exactly the price you're going to get, negotiate that before you sign it. If it doesn't specify exactly how long you're exclusive, negotiate that before you sign it. If there's milestones, in their phrase, vaguely, make sure that your understanding of the milestone that you're comfortable with is spelled out exactly in the Loi. There's going to be this tense sort of period of time where they are pushing you to just sign it because, hey, bro, we trust each other. We have this great relationship.

It's all good vibes. Before you sign the loi, we're going to figure it out. Let's not hold this process up. We're excited. I would just take a beat.

It's okay to make them sweat a little bit in this moment in time and make sure anything that you care about is in writing in the Loi. Another way I would think about this is, and this was literally my experience, you will lose about approximately every single negotiation that happens after the Loi, because then the lawyers get involved. The lawyers understand exactly the dynamics here. And the lawyers on the acquirer side, who are much more numerous, much higher paid, don't care if the deal closes because they're getting their fee either way. Fully understand that you have no other options, and so they will just grind you out until you are over a barrel, starting to miss numbers because you're distracted and you've been exclusive for months.

So if it's important to you, it goes in the Loi before you sign it.

I have seen this happen. You all would not believe this. I have seen deals blow up. The day they were supposed to close, literally six months ago, we had this nice meeting. For the next couple of months, it was all good vibes.

We got through the grinding legal negotiation. Something changed at the acquirer. There was a reorg. They didn't expect a CEO changed. They didn't expect the day before the acquisition, the CEO got new, CEO got in and went boom.

All m and a is off while I figure out what's going on here and they just literally walk away. I have seen companies that thought that wouldn't happen, where they just watched movies all day because they thought they were done and they were selling out and they were getting their check. I am not making this up. I swear to you. You want your co founders to know, you want your board to know a.

They have to know and be, they're going to be incredibly valuable in helping you through this process. And there's going to have to be a few senior people who know, maybe your COO or other top management people, a couple of people in finance who work on the deal. You got it. Like, it has to be a battle to let even one other person into their room. Like, you want to keep it as close as possible because once a pernicious sense develops at the company that what we're really doing here is getting acquired, people stop hitting targets and then the deal blows up.

You have a problem that might be unrecoverable and you can kill your business. This really does happen. You really have to watch out for this. Last thoughts? This goes in the category of things I learned about life from going through this process and things I would just keep in mind.

Aka, are you sure you want to do this? Here is what happens. 95% of the time, 92% of the time after your company is acquired, the acquirer gets its hands on it. The acquirer tries really hard to do a good job integrating it and running your business. They ask you every step of the way, maybe if they like you and trust you for a while, what they should do.

How would you have handled x? How would you have handled y? But then they just trip over themselves trying to execute a business they're not familiar with, and they screw it up. They don't understand your culture. Your team quickly understands that they're not working at the cool startup that they used to be working at.

And they also quickly understand that the people who are making the decisions now clearly aren't clueless. Clearly are clueless. You're trying to smooth it out between both parties, but they can tell that you're powerless now. And the team gets pissy and quipped, the targets start getting missed, starts to be bad feelings on both sides. And the acquirer eventually decides, with half the team gone and the targets being missed, that this wasn't worth it after all.

And they shove it into a corner and they maybe maintain the current customers. But that's it. Sometimes this doesn't happen. Google's acquisition of YouTube was awesome. Facebook's acquisition of Instagram was awesome.

I think if you ask the founders of those businesses, they might have mixed feelings. Just guessing, but maybe not. Maybe they're enjoying their yachts, I don't know. But if this slide looks to you, like, worse than your current situation because your business is going basically great, then I might stick to your current situation. Everybody answers this question for themselves, but you're going to get, as you go native on the deal.

As you're in month four of negotiating it, you start to see sunshine and roses about what it's going to look like on the other side of this. If this slide looks worse than your current life, I'd think hard about whether maybe you just want your current life. You personally are going to have a hard time as a founder for the couple of years that you work at the acquirer. This is a photo of me working for my acquirer. Just kidding.

This is from Lawson translation, which is a great movie, but it can feel very lonely. You're the one trying to make it work. So you're not part of the crew at the acquired company that's just cranky about what happened to you now. But you're also not part of the acquirer that's trying to figure this out. You're just in the middle bridging these two worlds for a long time, and at least in my life, because the company that acquired us was headquartered overseas and had a bunch of overseas offices, I was living in hotel rooms trying to make this integration work.

You're getting everyone a win. It's not a win. First of all, it's a large amount of money. Second of all, it looks like a big career win to everyone on LinkedIn and their careers. That's not nothing.

People really appreciate that. And you're delivering a lot of value to the acquirer. Even if they screw it up, there's a lot of value that they get here. So it's a big win. But what you are giving them in exchange for the big win is a couple hard years of your life.

So there's this idea that I had that I would take, like, I sprinted towards the close date, and then I'd be able to take a breath and take a moment and decelerate from the ten years of running a hard business, or seven or eight years at that point. And what ended up happening was I accelerated through it and into a relatively stressful couple of years of my life. My sense is that this can be worth it. From a personal point of view, I don't regret selling my company. At the end of the day, I think it was the right thing for the business.

But I would caution every founder who enters this process that this is what it looks like for the couple of years where you're integrating your business. And then finally, it's been a shock to me how impactful the six months before and maybe six months after the close date were in terms of my reputation and the reputation of the founders and the senior team in the industry. You have this cap table, right, this Excel spreadsheet or carta login that describes how much everybody owns, and it even describes how much everybody owns in various scenarios, via liquidation preferences, investing schedules and things like that. Those documents are a promise. They are a personal promise that you, the founder, made to each of these people.

I sell 20% of my company to a VC. Dear VC, if we sell for over x amount, you get 20% of the proceeds. You hire an employee, you give an early employee 1%. Dear employee, I promise that if you invest this whole thing and we sell for over x amount, you get 1%. The acquirer will propose to you various mechanisms for not having that happen.

They will say, hey, I promised you, buddy. Sequoia Capital is fine either way. You don't have to go out of your way to help Sequoia Capital. They'll suggest to you that an ex employee who's holding 1% maybe shouldn't get their share. You made a promise as a founder, and it's on you to honor those promises.

That's my personal belief. I know that's a moral statement and people feel differently, but that's my personal feeling on the matter. It's on you to hold it up. Nobody else is going to hold it up. And your reputation, whether people want to work with you again hinges on, a whether you kept your promises in these moments, b were transparent, especially with your board, and C, we're empathy.

Good. How are you with everyone? I am good. Just hitting my volume here. We're empathetic with everyone, and that there's a lot of secrecy and that's the right thing to do.

But then there's also moments where you make announcements and where you share information, and the empathy and transparency and the understanding that everyone's going to experience this differently are very important in those moments. Real quick, top five takeaways. I won't repeat them here, but I'll leave them up. These are the things that I would tell any founder going through this process as they start to engage with it. Harry, it's Jason.

Jason Lemkin
Could I ask one? Sure. So this is very good. This was very good. I thought about this a lot in general for the same reasons as you have, and your slide you had before was a really good one.

If you don't, if you're not comfortable with these things, the two to four years, don't at least think about not doing it. I would agree with that 100%. I would say we were in a position, as I showed on one of my first couple of slides, where the growth had tapered and had been tapered for a couple of years. We had raised a bridge and we burned through that bridge trying to reaccelerate growth and we still hadnt. And there were some discussions about a second bridge and Im like man, were just diluting ourselves to nothing trying to reaccelerate this thing.

Harry Glaser
If you had told me, look, I dont think periscopes data is going to live past a couple of years after the acquisition, and I think your life is going to be really hard for a couple of years. But all the employees are going to get a win and the series B is at least going to get a one x and the series A is at least going to get a little return and your employees are at least going to get a win and theyre going to get that payout. I think I wouldve taken it, but if you hear those things and you go, shit, were still growing then, yeah, I would strongly consider not doing it. Clay. Yeah, its funny, the question I had on it.

Jason Lemkin
So I think I havent put it together in a spreadsheet, but Im going to say 80% of founders that have a successful exit have some laments or regrets around it, right? 80%, I'm going to say all the way to the top, all the way to the Ryan Smiths that sold twice for qualtrics. And I think we've also learned, you talked about your growth decelerate and I. Think we've learned in b two b. If your NRR is high and your growth is even decent, even just decent, you'll get bigger, right?

So don't the kind of the learning I had through 2021 was default to not selling. That was my learning from 2011 through 2021. Since then I have evolved my thinking. Just curious to get your thoughts now. I have seen folks pass on offers that will never come back, that will never come back.

And so I have changed my mind radically. Even having invested a lot, I think as a founder, don't sell in quotes. But if you're not sure and it's profitable, you should sell. If youre not sure, if youre not sure, thats what I tell folks as a default. Now ive changed my mind.

Harry Glaser
Yeah. I think lucky for me, because I was a first time founder and I was emotionally redlining the whole time. But as Jason, we had a really good board and we had a good talk about that and we talked about our NR was our ARR growth was not good, but it was mostly the fault of new business and the NR was good. So thats up to you. Accelerate and all those things.

Yeah. One piece of feedback I got from the board that I thought was helpful is reacceleration is really hard, in part because there's going to be newer startups, I don't know how many people know periscope, but we would have been competing now with new companies like Hex or something like that. And there's going to be newer startups who don't have this debt, both the technical debt and it's an older product, but also the preference overhang from multiple bridges and the board members who are maybe emotionally, if not literally, written this off a little bit and all this stuff. I would say on the one hand, there's no guarantee that you get a good offer again, but on the other hand, I think this probably is the end of your baby and it's going to be a really emotional and difficult couple of years. And so that's your trade off.

Jason Lemkin
Trade off, yeah. Yeah. I remember I was so blue the second time after making so much money, more money than the first, I literally just crashed my partner's car into a telephone pole. I just, I was just lost for a year before starting Saster. But then I remember at the peak, a founder called me and he was like, I've got this offer.

I'm young. I'm going to make $500 million. I'm going to make. And I told him, don't do it. I told him, don't do it.

And I think this was some of my worst advice ever. Now, he'd already made the decision. I was one of the last calls. I was not one of the first. I was not on the board like you were talking about.

But there was so much momentum in the business that I'm like, you'll be depressed as a founder that you're not going to make $500 million is so much better. You're not being offered this because your business is a dog. Right. But this is also, but I think that was even though I didn't, I wasn't the, I didn't push him over the line. I think it was one of the worst bits of advice I've given in my entire career.

Because as good as that company is, I don't think you'll ever make 500 million. Yeah, it's not all about the money, but the time. But it may take a decade to make less. And then I just realized, maybe he shouldn't have done it. Maybe he shouldn't have done it.

But I gave bad advice anyhow. Shut up. But that was my learning. Like, I'm on two sides of advice. I'm like, take it.

As a founder. I'm not. But it's just, it's different. There's so many. But when you sell your child, you only have, you don't have that many at bats in life.

Harry Glaser
Yeah, all right, I'll shut up and. Let other folks are just curious. You're learning on my worst advice ever.

Taylor
Thanks, Jason. New Jason has great commentary. Obviously a lot of experience in the same topic. Harry, thanks so much for the great presentation. Your transparency has been so much fun on the session and I know everyone's really appreciated.

You're getting a lot of amazing comments. People are super grateful. So thanks so much for all the insight from everyone. We will see you next week. Thank you, Taylor.

Bye.

Jason Lemkin
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