Not Every Company Can Be A Unicorn
Welcome to Regular Horses: A newsletter for the rest of us building great companies
A couple of years ago my co-founders and I were fortunate enough to find ourselves in the position of having our company acquired. After five years of the insane rollercoaster that is startup life we were finally at the finish line - someone wanted to buy our company.
If you’ve never heard of Splyce, that’s ok. I didn’t use to think that was ok - I was completely obsessed with building the biggest company in the world, and nothing less - but I’m finally getting right with that idea. We got to do some REALLY cool stuff, like:
See our merchandise being sold at an NBA/NHL arena pro shop
Sit alongside thousands of screaming fans of our teams
Play for world championships
And even sometimes even win those championships.
It was a mind-blowing experience, both the high high’s and the low low’s.
To this day, I’m still not exactly sure what I expected to happen after it was all done. There was definitely an incredible period of time where I felt pure exhilaration that we’d built something that held enough value for someone else to want to pay to own it. And I’d be remiss if I pretended that getting an influx of cash wasn’t a massive load of stress off of my back. It allowed my wife and I to pay off all of our debts, build a retirement savings and invest in our children’s futures. To say that I remain grateful today is an understatement.
Then a few months pass and you start to think
Well our company didn’t get as big as X
And you start to wonder what you accomplished in the first place.
It’s a really easy spiral to get pulled into. We look at the news every day and see how companies like Amazon and Google are still growing tremendously. It seems like almost weekly there’s tweets about yet another startup getting a billion dollar valuation on their recent funding round.
My company never remotely approached a billion dollars. I’m guessing many of yours didn’t either. Most startups don’t become Twitch or Uber. Plenty of them cease to exist. But a lot of them are just like Splyce, too.
The three of us set out to build an awesome company. Today, over a hundred people have jobs because of what we started. Numerous people working throughout the gaming industry got their start at our company, sometimes as their very first job out of college. We worked on business deals that changed the face of what esports is today.
It’s time to start calling that success. It’s time to feel proud to be a regular horse, rather than a unicorn.
Looking forward to continue down this path with you as I share my journey, you share yours and we find peace with what we create. There’s lots of learnings I plan to share that I imagine will help you find your path.
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