Cal AI · B2C · AI calorie tracker
Turn down early buyout offers when you see more growth ahead
Later sold for more at ~$50M/year; price not disclosed
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- End of 2024
In their words
I Spent 24 Hours With iOS Millionaires
… So I offered that he join us. And thankfully he did, he wanted to join. And things just went great from there. The whole partnership, the whole team, we had a great dynamic. Can you give me an example of when there was like a fork in the road, like a really big product decision, or there was like a major conflict, and how you guys settled that? Initial acquisition offers, end of 24, we were receiving low eight-figure acquisition offers.
And everyone on the team was conflicted because on one hand, this is life-changing money for everybody involved. And on the other hand, we have this product which we deeply care about and we feel like there's so much more growth to be done. And I think the way that we resolve this was we kept super open communication. We would all call each other constantly during this period. And through this trust in one another, we were able to reach a collective decision like, no, we definitely should not sell.
But I think in a co-founder dynamic and relationship where you don't have those levels of trust, you're not going to take your company to its true ceiling and its true potential. Cool guys, well, trust is the number one thing. So for anyone watching this who's building alone, looking for other people to build with, find people you can trust. And we're gonna go to your office, and I wanna talk more about the opportunity of iOS and see if it's …
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Tags: declined-offer, cofounder-alignment