Chapter 3It's Not You, It's the Acquirer

In mid-2021, after finally deciding it was time to sell, my cofounder Borui and I spent several long, hard nights aligning on what that actually meant. We both agreed: the company was in a good place to explore the market. We told our board we were ready to entertain acquisition offers and reach out to potential acquirers. Everyone felt confident we could fetch a strong outcome.

By every metric, we looked like a perfect candidate. We had solid revenue, a lean team, clean governance, and a mature suite of products. On paper, we checked every box for a deal north of $100 million.

So we went to work. We polished our deck, built the dataroom, and brought a banker on board that September to run the process. Within weeks, we were taking meetings with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley and every major player in our space. For months it felt like we were always on calls — one day pitching to a tech giant, the next to a unicorn startup. Yet nothing moved beyond the second meeting.

Four months in, not a single written offer. That was when the realization hit: M&A was never about us. It didn’t matter how prepared we were, how crisp the narrative sounded, or how badly we wanted to join forces. Unless a buyer believed their future depended on acquiring us, nothing would happen.

That’s the brutal distinction between fundraising and selling a company. Fundraising is founder-driven — you pitch your vision, and investors decide whether to believe. Acquisitions are buyer-driven — the buyer has to believe their vision is incomplete without you. Until that moment, you’re invisible.

So much of the exit game rests on variables you’ll never control: a buyer’s internal roadmap, shifting budgets, an executive’s conviction, or simply whether they’re in the mood to do deals this quarter. That’s why so many perfectly good companies never get acquired. There’s nothing wrong with them — there’s just no buyer on the other side.

You can and should prepare. Keep your governance clean, your metrics trending up, and your relationships warm. But know that all of that only matters if the acquirer is already motivated. Without that alignment, you’re just shouting into the void.

If there’s a single truth in M&A, it’s this: companies are bought, not sold. Your job isn’t to convince someone to buy you. Your job is to build a business so compelling that, when the right buyer finally needs you, the fit is undeniable.

And yet, even knowing that, I still managed to make one of the biggest mistakes of my founder life — when I ignored an inbound message that, in hindsight, might have been the opportunity.