In the current climate, for many dating companies – whether startups or established brands – an exit through acquisition is an attractive option.
Recently we saw the dating industry’s biggest ever acquisition, with Plenty of Fish being sold to The Match Group for a whopping $575m.
And while there have been some fantastic guides written on how to sell your startup, a recently published article looks at what happens after you’ve sold your company.
Written by Travis May in TechCrunch, the article talks about how to make an acquisition successful when you integrate into a larger company.
May sold his company, LiveRamp, to Acxiom for $310m last year – and after the huge celebrations, became worried that “large bureaucracy would crush our culture; we’d lose our agility and focus; our team would lose its drive and ultimately leave; and our products would become stale.”
When such acquisitions happen, May says you have two options – to subsume the company or to “ring-fence” it, anywhere in the middle is “destined to fail.”
His very interesting guest article speaks about how to avoid this – depending on which option you choose.
Read it here.