Slide's Hostile Acquisition Meeting
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Siqi Chen shares a bizarre meeting experience with Slide, a company that was considering acquiring his Facebook app.
"I had this app on Facebook that was blowing up, and some guy who worked with Keith Rabois, who was the CEO of Slide at the time, said 'Hey, we like your app, you want to meet the team?' I thought, 'This is amazing, I could meet Max Levchin.'
I go to the Slide office at noon and no one was there - everyone's out for lunch. I waited half an hour, then they walked in acting like they kind of forgot about the meeting. We started talking about what I wanted to do with my app, and they asked how much I wanted for it. I said $2 million since I had a cofounder.
They told me, 'We bought SuperPoke and that founder is easily the 18th or 19th most important person in the company now' out of about 60 people. I said this probably wasn't going to happen since we were profitable from ads. They responded, 'You shouldn't confuse revenue for success,' which upset me, so I replied, 'You guys shouldn't confuse a lack of revenue for success either,' and they got upset.
Then it got really weird. At the start of the meeting, they said something like, 'There's a recession coming up,' and then one of them said, 'I can't wait to buy all these shitty companies for cheap' - while we're sitting right there in the room! We were like, 'What the hell?'
At the end, Keith asked Max, 'What was your body fat percentage in the PayPal days?' and Max said '8%.' Keith then looked at me and said, 'You're fitter than me.' I was thinking, 'I'm not the fittest person, but I'm not selling you my company because of this. What is happening?'
What made it all make sense was the next week when I talked to my friend John who also had a company building apps. He told me, 'You won't believe this - I just had a meeting with Slide last week. It was so weird because they started the meeting talking about how there's a recession coming up and thinking all these companies are cheap.' I was like, 'Oh my God, it's the script!'"