
Ask HN: Use a banker to sell a seed stage company? - anon72
(Going anonymous for obvious reasons)<p>My B2B software company raised a pre-seed round, built a product, and got some great customers. Our industry&#x27;s long sales cycle, along with resistance to buy from startups, has made raising our next round of funding harder than we thought it&#x27;d be.<p>An investment banker with deep knowledge of our industry thinks they can sell our current product and team for ~20X what we&#x27;ve raised. As a good steward of my investors&#x27; money, I&#x27;m inclined to give it a shot.<p>Has anyone on HN used an investment bank to sell a seed stage company? I would have thought it was crazy, but this bank is really confident in their ability to elicit a transaction.
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siegel
It's certainly not unheard of. But you are going to be paying a hefty
commission. And if it's a sale of you current product "and team," what would
be going to the investors vs. being reserved for employee incentives post
acquisition?

Do you have a sense of the players that would potentially be interested in
acquiring your company? If so, I would start using your network to reach out
to those players.

An i-banker may be great if you are looking for a private equity-type deal.
But if your potential acquirors are companies like Salesforce or Google or
some other tech company, you might be better off exploring on your own.

To the extent you engage an investment banker, be very, very careful about
what you sign. Those agreements can be incredibly onerous...

