Startup Exits

In the days when TVs were "dumb", everyone tuned into the same content. Today, the TV watching experience is highly personalized, including the ads. This realization led Ben Antier and Cedric Tournay to start Publica, an advertising platform for smart TVs that was acquired by Integral Ad Sciences ($IAS) for $220 million in 5 years since inception...

In 2021 it's not uncommon to hear that you should build a community before building a product, but not many people could have told you this advice in the 1990s. Rob Howard, who built the early community for ASP.NET while working at Microsoft, is one of those people. After seeing the incredible power of an engaged community, Rob went on to start Telligent in 2004, an industry-leading community software company that he ran and scaled until its acquisition by Verint in 2015...

“We’re building a city the size of Paris each week, so every non-optimal project that’s built today is a missed opportunity for changing the world” –– this is one of the reasons why Carl Christensen founded an AI-driven architectural design startup, Spacemaker. The company raised over $30 million, was declared a startup of the year in Norway and was acquired for $240 million in just 4 years...

Revett Eldred is a British-Canadian entrepreneur with two, eight-figure exits. After spending his career as a programmer in the 60s and 70s, he got tired of the bureaucratic nature of corporate America and started his own consulting firm, Minerva...

Facebook purchased GIPHY for $400 million and Take Two purchased Dots for $200 million –– what do these two acquisitions have in common? Three things: both are 9-figure exits, both happened in 2020 and both were incubated by Paul Murphy. In this episode, we focus on Paul’s experience in incubating and growing Dots, a series of casual and highly addicting mobile games, towards their eventual sale, and Paul's subsequent transition to venture capital...

In late 2000s, Janelle Benjamin predicted the upcoming digitalization of the gaming industry and started SuperData, an ahead-of-its-time market intelligence and analytics company for digital games and VR. She grew the company to dozens of employees, millions in revenue and a successful exit to Nielsen...

Usman Haque is one of the most influential figures in the world of Internet of Things (IoT). After studying architecture in London, Usman founded Pachube (now known as Xively), a pioneering IoT platform that went on to be acquired by LogMeIn and later by Google for $50 million...

With friend and co-founder Alex Mehr, Shayan Zadeh came to US from Iran at a time when both countries had no diplomatic relations or direct flights. They went on to study computer science, work at NASA and Microsoft, and start Zoosk – an Inc 5000 dating platform that went on to exit for $250 million...

After coming to US as a student, Thejo Kote met his cofounder Jerry at the University of California Berkeley; there, they worked on a school projected that turned into a $115 million acquisition seven years later. Crazy! Thejo is a founder of Automatic, a "fitbit for the car" company that paved the way for making cars more connected and was acquired by SiriusXM in 2017...

Since the beginning of his tech career in the 1990s, Yan has experienced multiple startup exits as both an employee and as a founder. Most recently, he founded and served as the CTO of Reverb.com – a wildly-successful marketplace for musical instruments that became a top 300 most visited website in the US and was acquired by Etsy for $275 million...