Weinberg: Harvey abandoned a $700M acquisition after securing $500M equity
Winston Weinberg · Speed, Stress, and Better Decisions | Winston Weinberg · May 12, 2026 · at 20:03
Harvey CEO Winston Weinberg describes a near-acquisition in early 2024 where Harvey attempted a buyout of a larger company before walking away to avoid risky debt.
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“The idea was basically we were gonna buy this company that ended up, it was 10 times bigger than us, people-wise and about the same, like, we were gonna, trying to buy the company For the same, a little bit higher valuation than we are valued at. We tried to buy it. We kind of like signed actually the deal before we had the money. So like what old private equity funds used to do right? Like KKR used to do this all the time, where they'd basically like sign the deal for the leveraged buyout, and then they'd go raise the money. It was a very common thing they used to do. And that's kind of what we did. And so we got the term sheet. We like locked them up for a certain amount of time, and then we went to go get the money. And of the money we were short we got like a lot of it. We were trying to raise like around like seven hundred million or something like that. And we got, I think like 500 in clean equity. And then the deadline was there. And we had an option. We could have taken like a loan basically with like pick. The problem with those is if you take that debt, if you don't fulfill the debt obligation, somebody else can own the company. Right. So it's not in, in dollars. It's actually in percentage points of the company. It's called payment in kind. And we decided not to do that.”
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