Bolt backed out of its Wyre acquisition on the scheduled closing date
Yanni Giannaros · He grew to $90M ARR, was about to exit for $1.5B—and then, it all fell apart. | Yanni Giannaros, ... · PMF Show · Dec 9, 2024 · at 45:09
Yanni Giannaros is the co-founder of Wyre, describing the breakdown of Bolt's agreed $1.5 billion acquisition of Wyre in 2022.
0:00 / 0:40exact quote · 40.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Yes, and basically you always find definitive agreement, and then you have closing conditions that usually take like a year, like we have to transfer our licenses over to them, and meet all these closing conditions, and then we had a closing there's like some period that we had for a closing period, and then they backed up the deal, like on closing date, like it was like, you know, a lot of things happened in between there crypto went from, it just didn't become as hot as it was, Early on it was, I think there was, I'm not going to go into specific details, but there are a lot of stuff happening in their organization as well but they just backed out on closing date, and that left us in a really tough spot.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Yanni Giannaros
Bridge had only 10% of Wyre's infrastructure before the Stripe acquisition
“Bridge is the same company as Wire, but has 10% of the infrastructure that we had.”
Giannaros claims Bolt's $1.5B offer for Wyre was actually 'really cheap'
“1.5 was actually a really cheap deal for you know, we probably should have asked for more on that,”
Wyre scaled from single-digit millions to $50M in revenue within months
“We went from maybe like a few million in revenue to doing like fifty million in revenue within like two or three months.”
SnapCard manually processed up to $400K daily on Giannaros's personal credit card
“I mean, we were doing like three to 400,000 dollars a day through my credit card.”
SnapCard gave free tablets to make SF the top Bitcoin-accepting city
“We like had our pos system on a tablet and we like went to merchants and gave them free tablet to accept bitcoin so we had more merchants in san francisco accepting bitcoin than any other city in the world all through snap cards like pos terminal”