Shaan's Masterclass: How To Sell A Business For Millions

**Shaan Puri** (0:06)
Okay, friends, family, people who like pink pop tarts, welcome, this is another masterclass. My first masterclass was on raising money. It was about how to create a killer pitch deck. That's the start of your journey. If you're an entrepreneur, you're trying to go raise money from investors to fund the company. This is now about the end of the company. How do you sell a company? Ben asked me to do a masterclass. He's like, hey, can you record a masterclass today? Your boy's lazy, so I'm repurposing a presentation I gave three, four years ago at HustleCon. I went on Google Drive, I found an old presentation. I actually didn't even look through it. I'm just gonna do it live here, sort of improv style. But I remember, I remember being on stage and giving this talk about how to sell a company because I had just sold my first company. And I remember at the time being like, I wish there was some more content about this because if you wanna learn how to manage people, there's tons of books and you're gonna get practice every day. If you wanna learn how to grow revenue or sales, there's tons of books and you get practice every single day. When it comes to selling a company, there's very little content out there that I thought was any good and you get very few reps. You might sell a company once every four years, 10 years. It's not a common thing that you do. And so if you don't practice, you're not very good at anything. So I learned something, some things during the process of selling my companies and I'm gonna share them with you today.
So let's see what I was thinking four years ago. The only thing I did was I removed the HustleCon banner at the bottom and I put a new logo there because it said HustleCon 2019 I thought that would not look so great. So let's jump in and hit the first slide.
I've sold two companies now, one to a big company. So when we sold a Twitch, Twitch owned by Amazon. So selling a company in Amazon was one way. And then Milk Road, we sold to two private buyers, just like two dudes who were independently wealthy from their previous businesses and it was a totally different transaction. So I'm gonna share some lessons from each. When I made this presentation, I had only sold Bevo. So I added the Milk Road one just before I went live here, but the rest of the presentation, I didn't add any lessons. So let's see if I've learned something the second time.
I always start with this when I come to selling a company. This is a picture of a foot and a dog and it is the first picture ever posted on Instagram. Kevin Systrom, the founder of Instagram, he posted this right when Instagram went live and today it's this iconic picture of like, this is how it all started.
And here's the guy himself, Kevin Systrom looks great, power pose, got the white sneaks.
And if you're Kevin Systrom, you got a dozen employees, you make a billion dollars, everybody loves you, right? Because you've built the hot thing and everybody comes knocking at your door, right? If you ask Kevin Systrom, how do you sell your company? He'd say, well, you got to create a sensational product and then people will just come and offer you a billion dollars, right? Like that would be his experience. My experience was very different. We had built a good, not great business. We had built a good, but early business and we were trying to sell. And so here's what we experienced. So if you're reading this or if you're watching this, you are not Instagram. And I think my talk will be maybe a little bit more applicable to you than what you might hear from the people that are on the Forbes list because they were in a totally different position of leverage and bargaining power than most people are when they go to sell their business.
This is you, you've tried, you've pivoted, you've hustled, it's not working or it's kind of working or it's working, but you're just tired, you're ready to move on. And this is a very common thing entrepreneurs get to.
And when you're here, it's okay to think, where should I go? I've been there, I felt it myself.
And this advice I heard all the time was, great companies are bought, not sold.
That sounds pretty cool. It's a nice little fortune cookie. But remember, you're not Instagram. And so great companies are bought, not sold. I think that's true. But most companies are sold, not bought. That's my contention at least. And that was my experience. We sold the companies more so than we just immediately got bought because we were just crushing it beyond belief. Like you would, like you see when, you know, whatever, huge companies get acquired.