Cannon-Brookes sold his first startup to competitor Blink for hundreds of thousands
Mike Cannon-Brookes · Atlassian: Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar · Feb 8, 2021 · at 13:55
Atlassian co-founder Mike Cannon-Brookes discusses Bookmarkbox, his first startup created while in university, which was acquired by US competitor Blink.com.
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“Anyway, Blink raised thirty-five million dollars. And we were sitting in Sydney and we were just like, holy shit, we're gonna get smoked. There's no way. So we called up the two or three guys that had raised a big bunch of money and said, look, we got a couple million bookmarks, and we got, I think we had a couple 100,000 users. Do you want to buy this thing off us? And one of them said yes. So I flew to New York and did a bit of negotiating with Blink, and we sold it to them for a couple hundred grand or something, and pay the investors back their money”
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