Hire a banker to run a buyout so the founders keep building

Jacob EitingI don't know. Some people know what they want to do with the company when they start it, some people don't. Was this pre-discussed at all? Did you be like, "Hey, we want to build this and sell this? Hey, we just want to see this." Did you have those discussions, or was it more open-ended?

Zack HargettI would say we had a healthy outlook and we didn't have our blinders on. We had conversations with a handful of companies. Eventually, when we kind of committed to going down this path, it was taking up a good bit of time. And that's the one thing that I would say to other founders, if you're getting inbound and you're really weighing the options here of acquisition, I would say make sure you keep your eye on the ball, because the moment you take your eye off the ball, that will reflect negatively in the ongoing conversations. We'll say that.

Zack HargettAnd so the moment we kind of said, "Hey, we're going to take this seriously, but we want to keep our energy focused on building and growing the product." We worked with an investment bank. We worked with a partner named Chris Park at Accretive Partners, and they were really great to work with, and then they kind of led the process from there. So we actually got back in touch with Quizlet through the investment banker.

Zack HargettSo we built a relationship with Quizlet and we really loved ... I think there's a lot of mission overlap for what it's worth. Something that we haven't covered is that Coconote's mission is to give learners superpowers, and that is not the explicit mission of Quizlet, but I would say in spirit, it is very, very similar. Learners can be of all ages.

Jacob EitingI think it doesn't get talked about much. Not many people have been through this.

Zack HargettEarly on, I started reaching out to founders, CEOs to talk about M&A process and how they handled it, how they thought about it. People that have been through it successfully, whatever. And one of the best pieces of advice I got is I think a great leader shelters other people. And so people on the team, our engineers, content creators, they didn't know about it until the day of close. It's not that we were withholding information because we didn't want them to know, it's that we wanted to shield them.

Jacob EitingNothing happened yet. And these things fall apart in the last week very often.