To sell a company from a position of weakness, first secure a strategic partnership. This creates dependency and leverage, reframing the eventual acquisition talk around a proven, shared success rather than a failing business.
When pursuing an acqui-hire, frame the conversation around the strength of the team. Selling technology invites the question, "If it's so good, why aren't people buying it?" Selling a top-tier team that will get hired anyway is a position of strength.
During an acqui-hire negotiation with Coinbase, the founders turned down a life-changing offer because it required leaving half their team behind. This ethical stand prioritized their long-serving employees over a massive personal financial windfall.
The company emerged organically not from its initial idea—a Clubhouse for companies—but from the underlying audio/video infrastructure built to power it. When the app failed to gain traction, the developer-focused backend stack was the true source of value and product-market fit.
Having a customer like OpenAI is the ultimate sales leverage. When asked about handling enterprise scale, the founder simply replied, "we power ChatGPT." This single data point instantly resolved all credibility concerns and shut down further diligence questions.
A founder's primary job is to place the company in a large, nascent market with massive potential. It is far easier to iteratively build the right product within a great market than it is to try and iterate your way into a better market. The market choice comes first.
On the same day, LiveKit's founder faced a "we're going to kill you" ultimatum from a tech giant, only to receive an email from OpenAI revealing they'd secretly built their voice mode on LiveKit. This illustrates the extreme serendipity and volatility of the startup journey.
LiveKit was focused on live streaming until OpenAI secretly signed up with a personal email and built its voice interface on their platform. This unexpected use case from a major player pivoted the entire company, showing how market-defining opportunities can come from outside your target vertical.
When investors who previously wrote off your startup try to maximize their return at the team's expense during an acquisition, use a co-founder negotiation tactic. One founder can play the 'bad cop' who is unwilling to concede on team retention terms, shielding the team's financial outcome.
Despite powering one of the world's most significant tech products, the founder didn't feel he had product-market fit until much later. This highlights a common founder bias to view PMF as a distant, elusive goal rather than a spectrum, even in the face of overwhelming positive signals.