Item — HN Reader

Recently went through this.

They first reach out for some kind of "we're looking to do something in this space and wanted to discuss working with you". Our first conversation was along the lines of "We're not sure whether we're going to build this, partner with someone or buy something. Keen to find out more about what you guys are doing and see if we can work together".

Next meeting it went to "We're clearly not going to build this ourselves, and it doesn't make sense to partner but let's talk about what it would look like if we acquired you. How do you think your tech/team would work inside our company".

Took maybe 6 meetings in total to get to a price though we probably could have forced that sooner.

1 comments

What kind of details do they ask before giving an offer? Anything that might be considered proprietary or were they eager from the go?

We ran them through the front end of our product and how it works from top to tail, discussing why we made certain product decisions.

Almost everything they could have seen as a user of our app but a few things that were admin functions.

A bunch of it they could have used to build their own app but we figured that was pretty unlikely.

They asked for a few things we did disclose like: - team size / locations / education - revenue (we didn't need to disclose but we did)

They also asked for a few things we didn't disclose like: - cap table - how much we had raised - what our last valuation was.

We kept it on a need to know basis - the above is irrelevant to them pricing the company.

Were there any NDA put in place or did you just hope for the best?

I can't reply to your last comment for some reason but there was a mutual NDA in place.

I think they needed it more than us to be honest, they were effectively opening up their corporate roadmap to us for what is now a publicly traded company. We were talking to competitors of theirs who we could have shared this insight with which would have done more harm than them taking any of our IP.