Chapter 4Caught Off Guard: Handling M&A Inquiries Before You're Ready

In early 2015, when Polarr was just getting started, Deep Learning and web-based graphics were still nascent technologies without practical use cases. Very few companies had production-ready software that combined the two. We had found a strange little pocket of opportunity: advanced photo-editing features—denoise, segmentation, object removal—running entirely inside a browser without the need of a large data center. That single technical bet let us reach users on Chromebooks, where storage and RAM were scarce, and soon after, on iPhones and Androids with the same shared codebase. We launched our iOS app in June 2015 and had a quarter-million downloads in the first 48 hours.

By 2018 we had raised a $13.5 million Series A led by DFJ, powered the camera apps of major Android OEMs of the likes of Samsung, LG and OPPO, and built a reputation as the quiet infrastructure behind hundreds millions of photos. We were flying high—and that’s exactly when one of the biggest companies in our space came knocking.

Below is the email that still haunts me.

At the time, Caleb’s company was already valued at around $6 billion. Today it’s worth nearly $50 billion and on the verge of an IPO. Looking back, that email was a golden ticket disguised as a friendly introduction.

But, we didn’t treat it that way.

I told my cofounder Borui to take the meeting while I focused on something “more urgent.” He met Caleb and his cofounder, who directly floated the idea of an acquisition and asked what our expectations might be. We hadn’t even talked about that internally. Borui didn’t know how to answer. The meeting ended politely, and we never replied to their follow-up. We simply… ghosted them.

Our silence was worse than a “no.” It was a signal that we were immature, unready, maybe even arrogant. We laughed it off at the time.

A year later, when we finally decided it was the right moment to explore M&A, Caleb’s company had already acquired two smaller, and in our eyes, much worse startups in the space and was busy integrating them. We tried reaching out again in 2024 and managed to get a meeting with his cofounder, but by then the company was too big, the priorities had changed, and our technology was no longer strategic. They passed.

That missed chance remains one of the most expensive lessons of my career. When a serious, actionable inbound inquiry lands in your inbox—especially from a decision-maker—you drop everything. You listen, you ask thoughtful questions, and you follow up quickly. Even if you’re not ready to sell, you engage. Because opportunities in M&A don’t expire in months—they evaporate in days.

The Silicon Valley myth is that acquisition talks are distractions. They’re not. They’re part of your fiduciary duty as a founder to explore any path that could maximize shareholder value. With hindsight, we should have both joined that call, answered honestly—“We haven’t really considered selling, but we’ll discuss it internally and get back to you”—and at the very least, kept the door open.

There’s an old saying: friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. In the world of M&A, relationships compound the same way. You never know which conversation today will become the bridge to your future acquirer.

Ironically, that failed engagement with Caleb’s company ended up saving Polarr years later. The half-year of due diligence we eventually did with them in 2024 forced us to tighten our operations, organize our data room, and clarify our story—work that directly prepared us for the eventual inbound acquisition inquiry a few months later which turned into the offer we ended up signing. Without that earlier “failure,” we might not have survived long enough to close the deal that finally did happen.

Every inbound deserves respect, even if you think you’re not ready. Because the truth is, readiness in M&A isn’t a moment—it’s a mindset.

And in our case, learning came at a huge cost. This missed opportunity still haunts me today, but I can’t change what happened in the past. So in any case, when you decide that the best outcome for the company is an exit, doing nothing and waiting for the perfect buyer to show up is no strategy at all—if no one is knocking, it is on you to manufacture some inbound interest when there is none. That’s what we will look at next.