How to Sell Your Company | Hacker News Reader

How to Sell Your Company

techcrunch.com

53 pointsnick0078 comments

The beginning of the article seems very convincing, but it is hampered by the fact that it finishes off with a hurried list of rather weak points like "Show up", "Don't fail", and "Before/During/After the negotiations", which doesn't even fit within the "9 most important things" list structure.

Oh, and the last few points are basically links to linkbait articles like "the 100 rules for being an entrepreneur"...

Weird, considering the good beginning.

About this topic I really liked Jaques' summary of the HN thread: http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+To+Sell+Your+Company

http://www.jamesaltucher.com/ The authors bio page, he's probably in the freelance article shopping game and TC happened to pick this up. He seems to be all over the place, syndicated blogger or something, seems he's guest writer anyone see differently. The article feels like it could be written for any tech, business, entrepreneur, stuffy get rich quick tv booklet. TC save yourself the trouble and get a full time journalist staff or don't publish as much content just to get ads up.

But he has sold a tech company, and is in general an experienced entrepreneur (plus knows old school finance and wall st money management from experience).

This doesn't make him infallible, but i'd much rather read business tips from somebody like this than a career journalist. (No offence to career journalists, they're great too, but for a different type of rigorous research.)

Yes he is a mouthy blogger publishing some numbered lists.

He also has a lot of experience: has sold some companies; raised vc; made and lost millions tittered on the edge of bankruptcy and come back again.

Have a read of his blog. its a mostly very well written, frank look at his life.

It's aimed a bit more at small businesses, perhaps even service businesses, but I liked this book:

"Built to Sell": http://journal.dedasys.com/2011/05/23/summary-built-to-sell-...

It's a bit on the fluffy side, and I've summarized the main points which he lists at the end of the book.

I second this recommendation... I found that the story-based format of Built to Sell made it much more interesting than other business books, so while I can see the "fluffy" critique, I think the message stuck with me more than other books. It's worth reading to understand the context for these bullet points. Great summary of the key points on your blog.

I like this:

we will value ourselves at 6 times forward earnings assuming you throw the weight of your customers behind us. If they say no, you can say , “ok, half that!”

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