Join John Warrillow on Wednesday, May 13, at 12 pm ET, for an exclusive live session on creating a business that can thrive without you.
This week on Built to Sell Radio, Boris Berenberg unpacks the blog post that earned him a quiet kind of fame inside the exited founder community: “I regret selling my startup.”
Boris built Atlas Authority, an Atlassian partner that resold Jira and Confluence to mid-market companies and built apps on top of the platform. He grew it to high seven figures in revenue and roughly 15 employees, all bootstrapped, all remote. He sold to private equity in May 2022 at around 3.5 times EBITDA, part cash and part rolled equity.
You’ll learn:
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Why selling at 3.5X EBITDA can feel like a win and a loss at the same time
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The three buyer buckets every founder should expect when testing the market
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How to avoid being valued on trailing twelve months when your business is hockey-sticking
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Why should rolled equity be mentally written down to zero before you sign
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What “dragon mode” is, and why it quietly turns a windfall into a second job
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The 30-value stack rank exercise that reframed Boris’s entire regret
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How to decide between cash flow and wealth before you sell, not after
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The option Boris never seriously weighed: hire a CEO instead of selling
If you’re weighing an exit, listen before you sign.
Quote of the Week
I should have had more serious buyers in that third bucket of giving real offers so that I could have played them against each other a little bit.
Deals
Enhanced Drilling, a Norwegian company that provides specialized drilling technology used to manage pressure and reduce risk when drilling oil and gas wells, was acquired by Expro Group (NYSE: XPRO), an oilfield services company, for $215M in cash. Enhanced Drilling is projected to generate $50M in EBITDA in 2026, implying a valuation of 4.3x EBITDA.
