Founders should only sell for burnout, imminent failure, or undeniable money
Ev Williams · Twitter, Medium and Blogger: Ev Williams · May 6, 2024 · at 1:01:01
Twitter co-founder Ev Williams explains the three-part framework he presented to Twitter's board when deciding whether to accept Facebook's buyout offer in 2008.
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“I thought about it very deeply, and I came up with this, like, okay, why would you sell a company? I think there are three reasons, and none of these meet that criteria. Three reasons being, you don't want to do it anymore, and so you need someone to do it for you, or you're in trouble. So there's famous cases, like, YouTube sold to Google. Obviously, amazing acquisition for Google, but YouTube was really in a lot of trouble, both with You know, copyright infringement and the scaling and infrastructure costs of YouTube really needed this, the shelter that Google could provide and lost money for years and years and years. And so I thought that was another reason that didn't seem to apply to us. And third was that if just from a fiduciary perspective, if the offer clearly was a no brainer from a financial perspective, then you might be inclined to do as well. And so my letter to the board was, I think these are the reasons to sell. I think none of them apply. And so we shouldn't sell.”
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