Kazi Ahmed, founder of Carbon 6, explains the acquisition multiples paid when rolling up e-commerce software tools.
Insight
Ahmed: E-commerce brand value lies in operators, not physical inventory
“The acquirer was looking at sort of, you know, the inventory and the store as the asset, and sometimes the owner as the liability, when it's actually completely flipped. This same owner, you know, after selling their sort of water bottle brand, would go out an…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Ahmed: Carbon6 Reached $10M ARR Deploying $16M-$18M in Acquisitions
“So obviously in a year, right, mid of twenty-twenty-one to, like, with twenty-twenty-two, we had gone from zero to ten million in ARR. You know, we had bought it, but, versus burning it on operations, but, you know, we had deployed, you know, I want to say 16,…”
Insight
Kazi Ahmed: Cost synergies in software roll-ups are minimal versus revenue synergies
“The synergies were much more on the revenue side. I think there were some on the cost side, right? It's like, you know, we, a much smaller marketing team could go across all of them and, you know, a smaller sort of engineering team could sort of handle all of …”
Insight
Kazi Ahmed: Customer surveys before launch teach founders mostly wrong information
“Most of what you will learn doing that will end up being wrong. Usually these things come, come together when like rubber hits the road, go out, build something really small, like around what you want to do and go sell it. People will say a lot of things in su…”
Assertion Supported
Ahmed: Amazon brand aggregators failed to achieve expected economies of scale
“Ultimately, a lot of the economies of scale didn't materialize. Fast forward to today, a lot of the aggregators have sort of gone through a lot of restructuring and so on.”
Disclosure
Ahmed: Carbon 6 raised a $16M Series A and a $50M debt facility
“So the Series A in equity was sixteen million. And then we the debt we got a debt facility later, which was 50.”