Sale Process Growth

Austin Rief shares how the company sale process was a significant period of personal growth and maturation for him.

"I think my big maturation - I matured a lot during the sale process. We dealt with so much and so many different stakeholders. Alex and I are really lucky - we grew up with nice families, we started this business, and basically from day one everything took off. We had no hardship.

The hardest part of running the business professionally was when we had the sale process. We had some investors who were pissed at us for selling too early - the same investors who six months earlier were begging us to sell. We had employees who felt they didn't own enough of the company.

What you learn is when you sell a company, there's a huge lump sum of money on paper, and when everyone sees that lump sum, everyone starts thinking, 'How can I get mine?' 'I only own 0.25% of this company, but I kind of view myself as a cofounder, I view myself as worth more than 0.5% of this company.'

I took that very personally. It was very hard for me. At the time, I was a bull in a china shop. I remember taking these calls, and my now-wife was in the other room. I'm on calls with these people, and my wife goes, 'Austin, you're an asshole.' I'm like, 'What do you mean?' She goes, 'You're a total asshole.' I said, 'But I'm right,' and she goes, 'You're totally right, but you can be right and not be an asshole.'

I was like, 'Oh, I didn't know that was possible. I didn't know you could feel like that was a thing.' So I was the total asshole up until then, and I think I've matured a little bit since then."