Julia Schottenstein: recommendation

Transcript context

…I want to come back to M&A for a bit. I had a few more questions there and I moved on from that. So again, you've done a lot of work within the M&A realm. Something that I saw recently, and this connects to the fact that a lot of startups now are looking to get sold. This VC hunter walk, he's a founder of Home Brew Ventures, had this interesting blog post where he basically suggested you should actually think about being public about the fact that you're selling your company. Which is crazy because in the past you never want to come across as too selly. I don't want people to think I'm desperate. And his point is many startups are desperate right now and it's okay to be public about that. And then in theory creates more of a bidding situation where many people know versus keeping it secret and in closed rooms. So my question is just what do you think of that? Do you think that's effective strategy? Is it not? I think it's good advice. If you're in a Hail Mary situation where you're looking for a home or you need an exit for your business, it's better to be transparent and cast a wider net. And you're right, in previous times founders tried to be a little bit cute or obfuscate that they were evasive the situation that they were in because they wanted to drum up some competitive interest when there really wasn't any. But unfortunately in today's climate, too many companies are in that spot so it's impossible to hide it. So the better approach is just to be transparent and I see it pretty regularly and there's absolutely no shame in sending a note that says something like, "Hey, we're looking for an exit for our company X, Y, and Z didn't pan out as we expected. We built a really interesting product and we want to keep the team together. We're running a process. Are you interested?" Really just as simple as that. I've seen a lot of companies put together these really detailed decks or even websites of just like, here's the team, here's what we built to be very promotional about it. Is that something you've seen? Is that something you'd recommend?…

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