It kind of feels like reading the world's longest LinkedIn post. I really wish this wasn't the case because I really want to take in the story and lessons, but it's literally too fatiguing to get through much in one sitting.
I didn't realize how poignant of a criticism this could be. Holy hell that hit hard.
I skimmed the content (it has no immediate relevance to my life) but even the chapter headings are sloppadocious.
If you're going to sink time into writing a book, it's worth spending some time editing it so your message gets through clearly. But that's just my opinion, your mileage may vary.
It corrects spelling errors and improves awkward wording. You can then go and choose alternative sentences or words. Just don't expect any sort of deeper intelligence.
Even early employees can early exercise and file an 83b.
This chapter is just self inflicted through bad planning, where the correct advice is to vest stock and make sure you file an 83b when you start the company.
The advice everyone should be getting here is not "don't take out a loan", but "make sure you get stock and an 83b"
Dear ChatGPT, please rephrase these bulletpoints into a chapter of my book: ...
Pray tell why may we not just read the bulletpoints instead?
Sold your own company, but unable to use your own words?
In a sense, "I wrote a book about it" is disingenuous and I agree the author's bullet list would probably be more interesting and would save us a lot of time.
"Now should you hire a banker when there is no actionable inbound interest and you have no prior relationships? I would recommend no, as in such a case bankers would typically rely on their network of Corp Devs and present your company to a laundry list of potential companies that likely have nothing to do with your space or business or you have no interest working for."
..is not how a great banker that actually does deals in the revenue size and market you're in would act. I can see how a "too large" a bank where you're small fry, would do this, but eg in my space ($2-20M ARR), the key job of your banker is to reach out to whomever would pay the most for your business, not just their corp dev buddies they happen to have existing relationships with.
That's not easy - there are 1000+ repeat software buyers with various portfolios and all kinds of timing constraints, and that's even before considering true strategics (in my range, the buyer mix is 70% PE or PE owned, 20% strategics and 10% other).
Typically, for a proper process, you'd want to see 100-150 (well sourced and properly targeted) potential acquirers. If they're just sending you to a handful of corp devs then they're not taking your business seriously and you should get another banker.
When I read PE multiples in the 3-5x ARR range, it seems like a fire sale compared to valuation prices. At 3x, you might just be giving it all back in liquidation preferences.
Am I missing something, or is this just founders who are sick of running the business and want to do something else, or are there lots of capital efficient companies in this range where 3-5x revenue is a good deal?
I agree that good bankers are hard to come by and unfortunately most simply forward decks to a broad list, and they won’t get founders the outcome they deserve. My point was more about readiness for a sale. Having gone through it, I’ve come to believe there are certain prerequisites for even kicking off a process, primarily business fundamentals and pre-existing relationships.
In my experience, a banker can amplify an existing market, but they can’t create one from scratch (at least not easily).
For example, in our case we had roughly six serious inbound inquiries before engaging bankers. While our bankers (and they are great) ran a broad discovery process and put us in front of many potential acquirers, the eventual buyer was one that reached out to us unsolicitedly rather than being introduced through the process.
This smells more like a $10-20m deal based on what I could find about his company. I could obviously be wrong, but 100 seems like a real stretch.
You can pretty much just create a free plan and run this in our debugger, which will compile the chapters and return PDF. Pretty fun little challenge.
BUT...
If you use this tool I just vibe-coded with our good friend Claude: https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/
And point it at the repository: https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo...
It will give you an ePub with all the chapters, including a bit of styling etc.
The code is MIT licensed, so do with it as you wish.
Though I'd rather download a PDF or ePub.
I would say that the current format is a 'book' in content, but not a 'book' nor an 'e-book' in form, as you can't manipulate it as a single object. But I've seen a few other examples here on HN where people showed off a 'book' purely as a website.
However I vibe-coded this tool for my personal use with our good friend Claude: https://onetake-ai.github.io/html-ebooks/
Which when pointed at a repository containing an "html book", like https://github.com/yan7109/yan7109.github.io/tree/main/ma-bo...
will give you an ePub with all the content in one place.
As it was I had to figure it out as it happened. I managed to thread the needle while avoiding any major pitfalls but it was a close thing that easily could have blown up. The difference probably came down to some good luck at the right moment, which isn't a great feeling in retrospect.