Seems like the goal of every startup is to exit via IPO, and if you can’t do that, by way of acquisition. In many cases, a sale gives a founder the opportunity to pay back investors and reward long-time employees, but what happens after the ink dries on the contract, and the reality of being owned by a larger company settles in?
We’re going to get the inside scoop from three founders who sold their companies, on a panel called ‘What Happens After Your Startup is Acquired’ this Wednesday, October 27th, at TC Sessions: SaaS.
Panelists include Monica Sarbu, who founded a startup called Packetbeat in 2013, which she sold to Elastic in 2015. She stuck around and ran the Beats team for almost three years. She is currently founder and CEO at Xata, and also runs Tupo.io, a startup she launched last year to offer underrepresented folks in tech free mentorship
We also have Jyoti Bansal, who sold his company, AppDynamics to Cisco the week it was going to IPO in 2017 for $3.7 billion. Bansal actually didn’t hang around, leaving the company upon the sale. Today, he runs two startup, Harness and Traceable, and also founded the venture capital firm, Unusual Ventures.
Finally, we will talk to current Gainsight founder and CEO Nick Mehta, who sold his former company LiveOffice to Symantec in 2012 for $115 million. He stayed around for a brief period of time, but wasn’t really involved with the company after the sale closed.
One thing is clear from these three founders: Each acquisition experience is going to be different, and selling your company is definitely not the end of the story. We are going to discuss what goes into selling your company, how and why founders decide to do it, and if you join another team, what it’s like to go from being in charge to being an employee.
Further we are going to talk about the emotional side of selling and what it’s like to walk away from something you put so much time and energy into building. Finally, we will cover what each founder learned from that experience of selling the company, how it helped them grow as business people, and what you can learn as founders looking at your company’s startup journey.
The panel is part of a full agenda for the day-long session looking at the impact of SaaS. In addition to this panel, we’ll have panels on open source, the value of data and the role of automation. Other speakers include Microsoft’s Jared Spataro, Puppet’s Abby Kearns and Google’s Javier Soltero. We hope you’ll join us. It’s going to be a full day.
