Nine-Day $200M Acquisition

Dan Porter shares the story of how Zynga acquired his gaming company Draw Something in an incredibly fast 9-day process.

"The whole deal got done in 9 days. They hired 2 law firms - one worked the first 12 hours of the day on the deal, and then the other one worked the second 12 hours of the day. I'm trying to run around and figure out how all this paperwork gets done.

The game was blowing up and not only was it so big, it was literally sucking the user base out of every single other game on the market. That affected Zynga, EA, everybody else who was about to report earnings and talk about their DAU and MAU numbers.

I went to GDC (Game Developer Conference) and the year before nobody knew who I was. It happened at the peak moment of the game, and suddenly everybody knew who I was. I could meet with every buyer in 2 days because everybody was in San Francisco for that conference.

We got a term sheet for $50 million which I had folded up and put in my pocket, went to an event, and I dropped it. I couldn't find it and I only had the printout so I had a rough idea of what the terms were, but it was on the floor of some party somewhere.

I asked the OGs who had been there for 4-5 years since we were only 7 people working above a combination Taco Bell Dunkin' Donuts, 'Do you guys want to raise money and build something really big or do you want to sell the company?' They were like 'sell the company.'"