Having founded and run CB Insights certainly helped mostly cuz I had some sense of where to focus.
In this case, we had product-market fit to use a tech term. My dad's product was great.
And so I didn't need to worry about that. If I had to worry about that, this probably doesn't unfold as it did.
That meant I just had to worry about 2 things:
1. Making sure we were buying raw materials at rates that allowed us to sell the product profitably
2. 'Ringing the register' aka making sales. And that ultimately is not intellectually hard but just requires effort, i.e. researching, calling, emailing, etc.
Hey. This is completely unrelated but I wanted to ask if you provide an RSS feed for your blog? I did find a /feed page but I'm unsure if it's working.
I just started getting a few texts from friends saying 'your post is on HN' and was confused. Prob been 10 years since anything I wrote has been on here so was an unexpected surprise especially as the comments are almost all quite nice (didn't expect that :)
1. He died suddenly so would have been a good thing to explore and do with time. It certainly would have made my life easier :)
2. Building a business that is small to medium-sized with no brand recogntion in a tier 2 city in India doesn't afford you access to tier 1 talent. India's talent and talent preferences are incredibly different than the USA.
1. Most importantly, we didn’t have the talent internally to do that. Running the biz requires a set of generalist biz skills and the company was comprised of specialists. They could tell me about issues in their domain but business requires skills across many domains. And running a biz of this size in a location as challenging as Nasik/Sinnar requires someone being the top dog as decision by consensus wouldn't work (rarely does).
2. Capital availability / accessibility - The team just wouldn't have had it. Indian credit and debt markets would not be available.
3. Non-traditional structure would have required a lot of education - Even if capital was somehow available (0% chance), this would have been an exercise in 'herding cats' and wasn't something I had time for. I was running a business here in the USA plus had a wife and 2 young kids. My work hours were already insane just operating the businesses. I was optimizing for a simple, clean deal for many reasons and a co-op would have been an amount of 'brain damage' I wasn't game for especially given factors above.
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Finally, I'll say that I don't think this would have been feasible in India at the scale and location we were at for one other intangible and cultural reason.
And that is because the employee to owner mentality transition would be non-trivial to impossible. The gulf is just too big. The reality is that reimagining yourself as a founder or owner requires a different mindset. There is no 'leaving the office' especially at the scale of Atlas (small/mid-sized). You're always on call to some extent and all problems seek you out (or you have to go find them). This is not the kind of responsibility and weight most people want at the end of the day.
This is a big question tbh and the lack of a succession plan is a function of many things:
1. This was my dad's baby. He loved the engineering and the science of it and so the idea of retiring from it was difficult for him to conceive. Doing that also requires thinking about one's mortality which I also believe was difficult for him.
2. This was a small market business in a tier 2 city in India. Attracting talent that could take it over was challenging. And myself and my siblings having been born and brought up in the States and being utterly clueless about the engineering/science of the company made us a non-starter.
3. As others have pointed out, he was thinking about succession/exit because he knew it was required for the biz to live on and grow. But life unfortunately had other plans and he was taken away from us unexpectedly.
There are definitely lots of could haves, should haves, would haves, etc I've thought about afterwards, but this was clearly one of those "play the cards you're dealt" kind of situations.
I don't think there is an Indian social contract but having been born and brought up here in the USA, I'd be talking out of my a$$ on that topic :)
This was maybe more of an implied or expected contract I had with my dad and mom who built the business and by extension the Atlas team.
Job hopping is quite common in India, but that's probably more common in larger cities. In a tier 2 city like where my dad's business was, there are limited options for a plant engineer for example, and as far as I can tell, the skills they have in a fine chemicals plant may not be immediately transferable to a plastics manufacturer.
And finally, many were with my dad for 10+ years so probably some amount of comfort in knowing the domain, the job, the boss, etc.
Thanks for the story and for putting the employees first. M&A of your sort should always select suitors based on chemistry fit - so when I read your list of candidates, it was already clear to me you would sell to the one listed last, and I'm glad it worked.
Selling to Private Equity is almost never what any founder would have wanted, as their job is to slice and dice, "cut the fat" and sell the pieces to different highest bidders.
>Selling to Private Equity is almost never what any founder would have wanted, as their job is to slice and dice, "cut the fat" and sell the pieces to different highest bidders.
Depends on the founder, I'm happy that the OP decided to look after his workers, but there's no loyalty in business.
Many founders would just look at the largest payday and be done with it.
I guess you can have a George Lucas moment and criticize the new owners for destroying what you made, but you're sitting nice with your profits.
OP comes off as someone who was already really comfortable, and the business appears to of been profitable.
But it would have been a completely different story if they were losing money, at a point you might just have to sell the company for parts and cut your losses.
Maybe offer some of the lifers generous severance packages.
There are lots of family owned businesses in the US that look after their employees. I think it’s more that there are significantly fewer tech companies in general that are family owned businesses.
I think maybe it's because the tech industry is so young, and because it was mostly populated by the young when it exploded in the 80s and 90s.
In IT I've never has a boss a generation older than me. Folk were/are basically my generation. In the early days there wasn't an "adult in the room" so we made it up as we went along.
We (as people) tended to be more about "people" than "money" (although I'm sure not all ex employees would agree.) There's a fine line between caring for people and staying profitable. But one can do both.
I'm not one for job-hopping (and I've likely left cash on the table for that) but that seems to permiate down. (Half the staff are 10 years+ now). We're also only adding a few posts a year. We don't hire fast. We don't fire fast.
But the industry in general was build by narcissistic folk in their 20s, who had ideas like "young is better", grow-fast, high risk, break things etc. IT culture is still like that (despite us being in our 50s now.)
But I don't think this reflects the world in general, or indeed industries in general. I feel like most people want a stable job, a stable life, and dont feel the need to move all the time.
As an employer, the OPs criteria of caring what happens to our staff has been front and center when succession planning. Just cause we retire shouldn't mean they're out of a job.
Thanks for sharing. Curious how things are now 6 years later: do you still keep in touch with some of the employees? Has the outcome been good for them?
I'm curious if you can share: how were you raised in the US while your father was in India? You were raised by a relative, or your mother lived away from your father?
This was a great ride, a very gripping read and a very touching story. Congratulations on your adventure and I'm sure your father and his second family is proud of you.
The analysis largely holds tbh even if the ARR is higher. At some point, euphoric private market valuations don't hold when there are public comps (of which there are many for Airtable)
And the company if you compare to those public comps is still worth a fraction of its last valuation although to their credit is probably is worth more than its total equity funding.
I'm happy to update the analysis if someone has verifiable revenue figures - else I have to use the figures that have been leaked or given to the press historically.
Love this idea. And congrats Alex - CB Insights Mafia!
Things that I think folks (aka me) would find interesting:
1. Impressions/views on tech markets (what they're entering, their views on growth of markets, etc)
2. Views on competition esp if they talk isht
3. Quotes with data. Because some of these products by tech cos are opaque with stats, if execs drop a figure about growth, that's valuable.
4. Over time, it'd be cool if you could see what products execs talk about in their public comments as that might give an indication of what they're focused on. Suspect they might not talk a lot about specific products so perhaps wishful thinking.
IMO, personally, I think quotes on politics are boring mainly cuz that doesn't give insight into the biz and cuz politics is already everywhere.
Enjoying the emails so far and look forward to seeing where Oversaid goes
For #3, you may want to include guest engineering blog posts shared to highscalability [1]. There are sometimes growth hints and stats included in the posts.
"The Everything Store," was very enlighting to me on Bezo's thoughts on business. It's just one nugget from the book. All the Amazon news stories that are propagation these days aren't really surprising once you read the book. Bezo's primary view on business is that you must work hard to get by in this world. All who do will get by and even thrive. All that don't will not. A Dog eat Dog kind of view. It's very good. I highly recommend it.
The Goal was a surprise hit for me this year. It was a recommendation from an airplane seatmate some months ago. Lots of good advice on starting to analyze systems for bottlenecks.
Running the biz required a set of generalist biz skills and the company was mostly specialists.