A veteran of two acquisitions offers a reality check for fellow founders, reminding them they shouldn't be in the start-up game just for the payout.
As the traditional rhyme tells us, the heads of children on Christmas Eve generally dance with visions of sugar plums. For start-up founders, the equivalent dream is of acquisitions.
Stoked by media tales of quick and immensely lucrative exits a la Instagram andfrenzied home buying in Silicon Valley following Facebook's IPO, the fortune-making exit tantalizes even the most level-headed entrepreneur.
This is simple human nature, of course, and far be it from anyone who's ever bought a lottery ticket or ogled a sports car to judge others' dreams of fabulous wealth, but a founder that's himself a veteran of two acquisitions took to his blog recently to remind entrepreneurs that while daydreaming is healthy (research confirms this!), selling your start-up for a boatload of money won't make you happy and shouldn't be the sole focus of all your entrepreneurial efforts.
Ryan Carson currently runs coding-tutorial company Treehouse, but previously he has built and exited two other start-ups. He sold DropSend in 2008 and Carsonified in 2011. Like most entrepreneurs, he confesses, he thought selling his businesses for a very healthy sum would instantly catapult him to a new, higher domain of success, but reality was different. He writes:
Selling your company doesn't make you happy and you don't feel like you've reached the summit of your career or life. It's just another stop on the journey.Yes, the extra money is useful for things like paying off your mortgage and giving you more financial freedom, but it doesn't change who you are fundamentally. If you're reading this post then you're already richer than a huge portion of the world, so selling your company isn't going to fundamentally change your existence. You already have a laptop, an internet connection and some sort of education. You already crossed the poverty line
'via Blog this'
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