So yeah, it's just like I, like, you know, the power of long term compounding, like was not allowed to fully set in when you said, you referenced it earlier as like dots on the map. And yeah, like when I think of the dots on the map, I just think to myself how much bigger we could have made it if I had had the maturity and the patience to really allow the long term compounding to set in. And I…
Acquiring Minds
So Much Fun: The Buyer of Choice in a Fragmented Industry
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I had a, you know, some, I, I was feeling some financial scarcity around illiquidity anyway and was so desperate to post a win for my shareholders that I, I sold too early. Which a Newbury Franklin is like a, a key tenet to what we're doing is like, is long term because I just don't ever want to make that mistake again.
And Mark, so much of particularly people earlier in their careers doing ETA for the first time, getting a liquidity event and having a kind of solving the money problem. I've heard it said in Silicon Valley, just get that first slug of money in your account and then you can breathe in your career a little bit. The temptation is just very strong. The default is exit.
What do you say? Do you discourage students from thinking that way, given your own experience? Yeah, it's such a profound question. Well, because Will, as you know, especially now, now back, you know, I can give myself a little grace because 10 years ago these options weren't as well developed.
Yeah, I could, but a more mature CEO would have developed them, him or herself.
But nowadays there's tons of good options to continue to run a business with people that you know in your cap table by just exercising liquidity events, which you can do through any number of buy, sell, hold types of arrangements. And there's a lot of, you know, Will Thorndike and Ken Weaver and Cole, Chris Hendrickson. There's a lot of really smart, experienced people in our community giving a…
So, yeah, I wish I had just had the awareness and the maturity to impatience to say to my board, listen, I would like some liquidity, but I, I still see a huge opportunity here. So is there something that we can do to kind of lock in that I can like tell myself I posted a win for folks, I got a little bit of liquidity and then off we go and we keep building the thing.
And I, I am certain that that could have been arranged if I had, if I approached it differently. And I wish I had. So that is how I, how I counsel students and, and just colleagues in the, in the community. But the, the real question is like, do you actually sell fire in the belly to do it?
Because if you don't or something is fundamentally changed about the industry, then yeah, right thing to do is to sell and move on. But if you sell the fire in the belly, then like, it's like, what a, what a disaster to, to sell too early. Well, you mentioned AJ Wasserstein before, and he's got a great, well, he's got many great papers, but one of them is devoted specifically to this question of…
And he basically lays out the math of, of holding as opposed to selling. And it's quite compelling. It is, it is required reading in my corset talk.
I agree. It is a very compelling paper. Oh, great. Okay. Yeah, as, as is a lot of the things that AJ has written. So, so let me just say a bit more, if I may, about the exit because, because there was a whole huge important chapter that evolved from that.
So we sold in 2015 to a private equity firm in New York called the WIX Group that focused not entirely, but largely on education. And the really exciting bit about that transaction was not the liquidity that I exercised, although that was lovely too. But right after the deal closed, the principal, the guy who'd kind of been at the firm for eight years, wasn't quite a partner, but wasn't the…
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