| I've read this a few times and having been through up and down periods it's clear that the most important part of this, is the following: The best time to sell your startup is when you have many options. It needs to be really emphasized that this is a very rare place for the vast majority of startups. That means this advice isn't generally applicable. Which brings up the implicit question, why would you decide to sell your startup if you are clearly winning and growing at the pace that you can build a sellers market? There are a lot of really good reasons you would, but I think all of them come down to: At some point you won't be able to be competitive in the market without the resources of a larger company. Whether that means you'll never be able get to an IPO, or you'll get out competed between now and then. I've never read a good rundown of WHY they decided to sell, Twitch or otherwise. So it's really a question of when, not if. Opportunities to sell will come in waves over time so how do you know which one you should take because it's possible to overshoot and then the whole thing goes bust (Digg, Foursquare etc...). What I'd be interested in is the Founders guide to selling your company when it has relatively few options. That's the more common case, and one that where I think the opportunities there are missed by most founders. I never read stories about that, I've only read "we were on track to a billion in revenue and sold." |
Re: why sell? 970 million reasons. Biggest one was that it seemed like good value for what we had.
Another reason: from my perspective (it may be different for other people involved) we were also at an inflection point where there was a steep power law distribution of people who owned content (game studios) and therefore a relatively small number of people had a lot of power over Twitch. Similar to Netflix pre-Netflix originals. That's not a good long term position to be in (hence Netflix originals). I think that's changed now for Twitch.