Cheddar's Planned Exit

Sam Parr shares a story about how John Steinberg, former COO of Buzzfeed, deliberately built and sold his company Cheddar exactly as he planned.

"John Steinberg was the COO of Buzzfeed for a long time. When he joined Buzzfeed it was like 20 people. He worked his way up to be COO and was the ad sales guy. He became COO and was almost like a co-founder of Buzzfeed.

He started this thing years ago called Cheddar, and the whole shtick was that it was going to be a live TV station for Facebook Live. When he launched it, he told me, 'What's going to happen is I'm going to raise a little bit of money, like $30 million. It's going to do pretty good, and then a big cable company is going to buy us because it's just going to be cheaper for them to buy us than to go make one of these cable networks on their own. They're just going to buy us for like $200-300 million.'

At the time, and even when they got bought, no one watched this thing. You would go onto Facebook Live and there'd be like 20 people watching it. I remember thinking this guy's crazy, this is not gonna work, this is nonsense, this is a bad business.

Two years in, he told me, 'In year 2 or 3 we're gonna get acquired for a couple hundred million.' In year 3, he sold the business for $250 million to an Australian cable company. He 100% called his shot. He completely disappeared after that, fell off the map. Before he was speaking at all these conferences, but he called this shot and he nailed it."