Money 2020's Profitable Exit

Sam Parr shares a case study about entrepreneurs who built and sold multiple successful conference businesses.

"There were these two guys - Jonathan Weiner and his Indian partner. They had previously sold an ad tech company and payment software business for hundreds of millions. Then they started a conference called Money 2020, which was a fintech payment processors trade show.

Within 2 years, they scaled it to $25-30 million in revenue with $10 million in profit, and sold it for $100 million. Right after selling it, they started another conference called Shop Talk for the commerce industry, which they also sold for over $100 million. They sold both Money 2020 and Shop Talk to different publicly traded companies.

Now they've split up - one founder is doing something called Fintech Meetup, while the other is doing HLTH.com, a healthcare trade show business. They're basically using the same strategy every time. If you go to all their conference websites and click the about page, they have these cool cartoons instead of headshots for employees. They're likely hiring the same people and graphic designers because their non-compete probably says they can't create anything in the fintech or commerce space anymore.

What's interesting is they keep getting into conference businesses instead of software, and they're crushing it. They don't raise money, and every 3 years they start something and sell it for $100 million using the same playbook."