We Sold Our Company for 8 Figures. Then Walked Away

The day we realized we were going to sell our company was surreal. We were in Boulder, Co for a Yoga Conference, and we were approached by an employee of one of the biggest distributors of yoga content in the world at the time - Gaiam. The CEO wanted to meet us.

My wife and I had built a wellness video streaming subscription platform from scratch and we were nine years in with hundreds of thousands of users. We were growing at 100% a year. We had members from all over the world. But we were exhausted and scared. Gaiam was a behemoth compared to us. Their ‘campus’ sat on nine acres of land. They were a publicly traded company with money to burn. They had moved from selling DVDS and apparel in Target and Wal-Mart to competing directly with us online two years prior. We didn’t know if we could keep up. They could blow us out of the water, so we thought.

The thing was, they couldn’t. When we met the CEO and his executive team, we were sort of naive. We thought they wanted to partner with us. Film shared content, or do some sort of marketing promo together. But as we sat through the meeting, they went on about global translations, apps on every device, partnerships with world-renowned teachers. It was an hour-long session of pure intimidation.

And then the CEO, an intimidating figure himself–6’6”, bald like an alien, in bell-bottom jeans and rainbow sox–looked at us across their massive boardroom desk and said, “How do you see us working together?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “We could shoot some videos together. Share them across our platforms.”

He shook his head. I don’t remember him smiling. Ever. “No, no,” he said. “I want to buy you.”

I looked over at my wife, Michelle, and she looked at me. We had absolutely no idea what we were stepping into here. First they intimidate us and then they say they want to buy us. It worked. We were scared shitless. Later though, we would find out that they were struggling big time to keep up. They had a massive staff of underlings being pressured to sink us, but what they didn’t have is two visionaries that worked, lived, and slept relentlessly thinking about how to grow and innovate their company. That was our outlier and Gaiam wanted us as much as they wanted and needed our content and subscriber base.

I remember walking out of that meeting, the two of us, and going back to our AirBNB and grabbing our workout clothes and going to the local community center and the two of us both running on the treadmills side by side like our lives depended upon it. All of this pent up adrenaline. Our life changing in a manner of minutes.

This was June. We returned to Boulder three months later to sign the papers. We closed an eight figure deal to sell our company outright in just three months. The CFO of Gaiam said this never happens. And I said, “What never happens?” And he said, “Solo entrepreneurs selling their company like this. And so fast. You hear about it but it's extremely rare.”

Part of the deal was us moving to Boulder to work for Gaiam. We were living in Vancouver, Canada at the time. So we uprooted our family, our two young children, and moved to Gaiam. In my head, I thought, okay, a new beginning. The CEO of Gaiam was sixty-five. He was looking for a successor. I was pretty confident and arrogant that I could be the one. And then we go there. We walked into their corporate offices, sat through a shit load of meetings, and within days realized we weren’t going to be able to do shit shit here.

They were so set in their ways and caught up in their corporate hierarchy that there was zero freedom to move. We immediately realized why we succeeded and they didn’t, even with all their resources. We tried to make change, but were shot down at every turn, told that making decisions on the go might have worked with our company but here they had data, real data to use to base their decisions on. I told them their real data sucked. But that didn’t work out so well. Within three months I completely shut down. I felt trapped and unheard. Within two more months, my wife and I both walked away completely. Left two years of earnouts on the table.

This entire experience was certainly life changing, but it also made me realize that bigger is not always better. The little guy has strengths too, often more so than the big guy. David vs. Goliath is a true axiom for this experience. The little guy has much more power than they think.