He missed one other reason, which may not be the sort of thing you want to discuss with your Board/Shareholders, but: "Opportunity Cost" - It may be that you are happy running the company, that you have no imminent threat, and the offer doesn't really capture all of your upside, but - the resources/team might be better suited doing something with a greater return-on-investment.
I think that fits under personal choice. How can the team be dedicated and "happy running the company" if they feel like they are missing an opportunity elsewhere or being under utilized? I would say that is the number one reason why founders get burned out and are "done". We all fear missed opportunity and wasted potential.
There are lots of scenarios where people have found the job, culture, and coworkers that they love, but are not yielding the greatest ROI of their skills/knowledge/experience and connections.
The willingness to leave something you love, to go do something that will be much more profitable, is not so much personal choice as cold-hard economics.
A good example is how a lot of lawyers will do not-for-profit legal work, because they feel like they are making a difference, and improving the world. They are making a personal choice to do something that is important for them (or perhaps they are burned out in the corporate grind).
I've also seen lawyers leave the organizations that they love, because they also realize they need to make a lot of money - usually to pay off ludicrous college loans - but also just to leverage their position for some period of time.
At the end of the day, every decision is "personal" - but I think there is a difference between the emotive, "I chose to do this because I love doing it" verus the colder, "I chose to do this because it maximizes the risk-adjusted net-present-value of future earnings."
Slightly tangential, but I signed up for Medium five months ago and I still can't post. At this point Medium has a negative connotation in my mind, just like Svbtle.
Perhaps these are the main reasons for hot shot startups and anything else that goes on in Silicon Valley, but the average small/medium-sized company might want to sell at some point due to the sentiment that the buyer can do a better job at running the company or has some required resources that are unobtainable (money, personnel) for the seller. Not a "personal" choice, but a strategic sale for the future of the company and its employees.
I think many people would love to be in a position where this question is applicable to them. For the very few, the answer is: when someone wants or offers to buy your company.
It's sort of like asking "How do you become a supermodel?"
>For the very few, the answer is: when someone wants or offers to buy your company.
It seems that way from the perspective of having never received an offer, but my own experience makes me skeptical. I haven't been in that specific position, but I have had a possibly analogous experience.
For a few years, I developed and supported myself with a graphics-tablet targeted shareware drawing program (now sadly, due to changes in the Mac shareware ecosystem, one of my backburner projects). One of the "big breaks" I imagined might come my way would be if a tablet vendor wanted to bundle my software with their hardware.
And one day, toward the end, I got an offer for exactly such a deal. A small vendor wanted to include my program in a tablet bundle for a relatively small holiday run. They wanted to know what I would charge per-license. I did some research to find out what a typical OEM markdown would be and made them an offer based on what I found. It was a significant discount, but it was a fair price, and I'd have made reasonable money off of it. They responded saying that this was far too much and that they really couldn't go over $1 per license, which would have been more than a 95% markdown. I attempted to negotiate further with them, but they stopped responding to my emails shortly thereafter.
Should I have just taken them up on their initial offer? Well, as the cards finally fell, I would have probably made more money that way. And if I'd known that I would shortly be shifting my focus away from development of that program, I might have made a different choice. But whether or not I made the right choice given the information available to me is not the point. The point is that it wasn't an easy "yes".
When you aren't getting any offers, it seems like any offer would be a coup. But that's not how the market works. If your company is worth $5000, there's somebody out there who would be happy to pay you $200 for it. You won't see many offers like that because the number of businesses worth $5000 is large and the number of people who are willing to send out insulting offers is relatively small. But "say yes to every offer" isn't a winning strategy.
If they didn't write back, it's hard to imagine they were serious about the offer. How likely is it they were just testing the waters with various providers?
It's also very likely that they weren't very competent. If I recall correctly, they wanted this for a Christmas sale, and they contacted me about it in late November.
Agreed, most often selling a company happens out of necessity rather than choice and founders are looking for buyers rather than just weighing the pros and cons of unsolicited offers.
This is really interesting. Seems like Snapchat would have fallen into the first two buckets (I can't see their upside being higher than an exit to somewhere like Facebook or Twitter, but I'd be happy if I were wrong).
Yeah a little bigger would be better; it looks great at 24px. Afterall it's a page full of nothing but text, might as well make the text big. But I think they're still catering to folks with screens as small as 1280x1024.
