didn’t want to...
didn’t want to sell the company to somebody that was going to disembowel it.
So that’s why, when we had an offer from NASDAQ—and we had a couple
of offers from them; I can’t talk too specifically about it—we felt that it was the
right strategy. We’ve known the people for a long time; we’ve had marketing
relationships with them; they’re going into corporate services and they’re very
sincere about that. They want to use Shareholder.com as the foundation for
building their corporate services. They’re keeping the name. The valuation was
right. It all happened very quickly.
Ron Gruner 443
Livingston: The stars were aligned.
Gruner: Yeah, they were all aligned. Somebody told me a long time ago that
generally companies are bought, not sold. And that’s what we did. We didn’t
hire an investment bank or anything like that to go off and sell us. We just
waited for the right opportunity.
Livingston: Is there anything you might have done differently with
Shareholder.com?
Gruner: Well, I think that bootstrapping the company on a quarter of a million
dollars made us a little myopic. We became so proud of that fact that we didn’t
find the middle ground. I think that in ’98, ’99, or 2000, we could have taken a
million, $2 million of capital, at a very attractive valuation, and retained control
and grown the company twice or three times as fast as we did. Perhaps that was
a mistake, not doing that. I don’t know, because everything worked out fine.
And when you only have so much money, it makes decisions much easier.
Here’s an example: back when the whole Internet thing was getting started,
I hired a computer consultant to come in and advise us about what our Internet
infrastructure should be. He was a well-credentialed, Microsoft-accredited
engineer, etc. He came in and said, “You need to buy x number of servers and
this kind of software and all that, and it’s a quarter of a million dollars to do it
right.”
We said we couldn’t even come close to doing that. So I went down to
Barnes & Noble, bought several books, including some of the Dummy series.
And we built our first Internet servers, which lasted us several years, on
Gateway desktop computers, using Microsoft Access as our database system
and using basically off-the-shelf server software. We did that for $3 [thousand]
or 4,000, and it worked great.
Livingston: Did having a background in technology give you an edge? I would
think a lot of financial services companies at the time didn’t.
Gruner: Well, in financial services, that may be. But we were kind of a different
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