Kate Warren
Marla Beck, founder and CEO of luxury beauty retailer Bluemercury. She sold the company to Macy's for $210 million in 2015.
Deciding to sell the company you've built from the ground up, and then finding the right partner, is rarely easy.
So Business Insider asked Jyoti Bansal, who sold AppDynamics to Cisco for $3.7 billion (plus other seasoned entrepreneurs and an academic director of entrepreneurship) to share some best practices around selling a startup - and the biggest pitfalls to avoid.
Our sources include:
- Marla Beck, the founder and CEO of luxury beauty retailer Bluemercury. She sold the company to Macy's for $210 million in 2015.
- Justin Kan, the founder and CEO of Atrium, a law firm for startups. He sold Twitch, a live-streaming platform for gamers, to Amazon for $970 million in 2014.
- Jeanette Miller, director of the corporate innovation and entrepreneurship major at Penn State Smeal College of Business and associate director of the Farrell Center for Corporate Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
- Steve Martocci, the founder and CEO of music-creation platform Splice. He sold GroupMe, a group-messaging app, to Skype for $85 million in 2011.
- Marc Lore is the CEO of Walmart eCommerce US. He sold retail startup Quidsi to Amazon for over $500 million in 2011, and Jet.com to Walmart for $3 billion and stock in 2016.
In exclusive interviews, these sources share the secret to successfully cashing out while keeping your best interests (and those of your employees) in mind. Subscribe below if you want to read a practical guide for selling your startup.