Something I haven’t had to contend with is knowing when to take the buyout offer when you have a product that has made it big. Nobody questions Google anymore, but can you imagine all of the offers they must have seen come across their desks? It must have been awfully hard to turn down billion dollar offers. Because nobody knows the future, turning down a buyout offer is fraught with the potential that you’ll never make it big and miss that one opportunity you had to make it big.
On that note, two sites have recently seen buyout offers.
- Facebook — Recently had a 750 million dollar offer and turned it down, saying they are worth 2 billion.
- Bebo — I actually just heard about this one today, it’s a social networking site and they turned down a 550 million dollar acquisition offer.
Knowing when to take the buyout offer must be really tough. From the outside it appears that both of these companies are entangled in their own hype magnet. But then again, what if Google had sold early as well?
3 responses to “Knowing When to Sell”
You must really believe in your potential to turn down offers like that. It is definitely a gamble.
It depends on your motivations for having started the enterprise in the first place. If you’re in it to make money and consider that 750 million is a good chunk of change on which to retire, then take the buyout, buy yourself a small island in the Caribbean and live the good life. But, if you’re in it to provide the world with what you believe is a valuable product or service and are truly emotionally invested in the success of said product or service, then your buyout threshold will be noticably higher. In the end, everyone has his or her price.
It was hard for native americans to understand how Manhatten could ever be worth more than a few blankets as well. new world