I was reading about how Twitter was shutting down Vine today. For those who don’t know Twitter had bought the company back in about 2012 when Vine had a pretty decent following. However, since that purchase they haven’t really done much with it to integrate it with their main platform. Not too long ago before this too Twitter had laid off pretty much all of the original co-founders of Vine. So today one of them posted this tweet saying “Don’t sell your company!”
From what I gather it seemed to be a regret of sorts of in allowing Twitter to buy them out where I assume they now feel they could have done so much more with it. That would ultimately mean more money of course. I have never been in that situation before but I could imagine if you just made your first big hit that it must be very tempting to take an offer of like a million dollars if you never seen that much money at once before.
I still remember one story that was kind of funny within this topic of getting the money while remaining as if you still own it. It had to do with Microsoft wanting to enter the video game business where apparently Bill gates went up to Nintendo and wrote them a blank cheque. However, apparently the stipulation that Nintendo wanted was that they would still want full control of all creative and management aspects of the company. Of course that deal never fell through.
I guess for me it would be how passionate I was about the product or service and whether or not that money would allow me to do other aspirations of mine. If I am not mistaken too there actually was an online retailer called Egghead.com which Amazon purchased. The owners accepted the money for the company and then went off to create Newegg.com. So that’s kind of an interesting way I feel on how you should think if you decide to sell your baby business. Otherwise you would probably regret it like this as you see your idea just die out in the hands of others.