The company that I founded and sold for 25 million is being shut down and the greatest team in the world that I've ever worked with is being laid off.

The company that I founded and sold for 25 million is being shut down and the greatest team in the world that I've ever worked with is being laid off. I'm going to tell you what I know and I'm going to talk about the product and the team. I'm doing this for a couple of reasons. First, this is something that is pretty common and so I want to educate founders and team members about how and why this happens. Um, I also want everyone to know about this team since they are being laid off. I'm wondering if there's anyone out there who needs somebody with these incredible skills. These are skills that cannot be replaced by AI and are particularly relevant and necessary in an enterprise marketing type of environment. About three weeks ago on a Tuesday morning, I woke up to a huge slew of texts from people who used to work for me. I talked to some of them on the phone and they said out of the blue with no warning, um, they were told that the company Boardroom Insiders was being shut down and that day they laid off the majority of the team. And one thing you should know is I did not sell the company when I sold the company in 2022. I did not sell it to the company that is doing this. I sold it to a company that had decades and decades of experience and history in the data industry. That's what's called a strategic acquisition as opposed to, you know, like a private equity acquisition. And I felt really good about that because I thought, you know, these people have been committed to the data industry for a very long time. This seems like a good home for our team. They're not going to just get laid off and they didn't. I mean, they kept most of the people who were not, you know, duplicative in with other roles in their company and they just went on operating the product and the same processes that we've always used. But about nine months in, that company sold off a bunch of companies. They sold, um, to private equity and so Boardroom Insiders was sold as part of that whole deal. Um, so this private equity firm is the one that sold that, that is shutting down Boardroom Insiders. But as soon as I heard that news, I contacted them and I asked them about buying it back because if they were going to shut it down, and this happens all the time by the way, if they were going to shut it down, I thought, well, maybe I can buy this back for pennies on the dollar, um, and just run it again. It has revenue. It has enterprise customers. I mean, some of the customers that Boardroom Insiders had over the years was like, you know, Workday, Salesforce, IBM, um, Adobe, AWS. I mean, we're not talking about customers no one's heard of and we're not talking about small deals either. Boardroom Insiders is a kickass product. It just is. So anyway, I met with this PE firm and told them I was interested in buying it back and they seemed like they might be receptive and about, um, a week later, I came back with a couple of different offers. Um, I have a financial partner who offered to buy the entire parent company, um, which consists of five brands including Boardroom Insiders. Um, they weren't interested in that and so then this past Friday night, I sent them an offer just to buy Boardroom Insiders and it was, you know, an all-cash offer, offered to take it over within a month, really quick due diligence. I wanted to make it very easy for them since they were shutting it down anyway, but they declined that offer and they declined it pretty quickly. They didn't try to negotiate the price or anything. So it wasn't that I wasn't offering enough money, I think. I think it was more like they just don't want to sell it. They just want to shut it down. And that's kind of hard to take because if they sold it, they would save a bunch of people's jobs and they would ensure continuity for the customers who use this product. I have no idea why someone would prefer to just shut down a company as opposed to selling it off. So that was a disappointment that they declined the offer. And people have been asking me, well, is this because of AI? Do they think there's no need for this product because of AI? And the answer to that is no. First of all, this product has several million in revenue still, I think. I mean, I haven't seen the numbers. Um, but I talked to a good friend of mine who's actually a Boardroom Insiders customer last week and she said the product kicks ass, we love it. Um, she had no idea that anyone was shutting it down. Um, I mean, I told her because I know people were laid off, like we all know what's happening here about AI. Talk about AI, the AI question. Yeah, if you're preparing for meeting with Tim Cook, you can go on Claude or ChatGPT and learn all about Tim Cook and, you know, whatever. But you're probably not going to get Tim Cook's latest earnings call scraped because there's a time lag with these tools and also they don't go deep into these earnings calls in a way that might allow you to pinpoint something that your company offers that could serve Tim Cook and Apple. Okay? I mean, I don't care how good AI gets, it is still so valuable and it gives you such an edge if you take the time to go to these source documents and find hooks that connect exactly back to what you're selling. And AI is not going to do that for you. Sorry, it's just not. So, um, this gets into my team that we built at Boardroom Insiders. These people have the most incredible business acumen. They can read an earnings call transcript because I trained them to do it. They can read an earnings call transcript and they can say, um, here are the marketing initiatives of this company, here are the technology initiatives of this company, here are the operational initiatives of this company, here's what the CMO is thinking about. Um, and AI is not doing that and AI is also not smart enough to be able to connect the dots yet, maybe, maybe later, to connect the dots between like jargony shit that the CEO says and being able to say, that's a marketing initiative, that's something for the CMO. But my team can do that and they did it daily. Um, so, you know, if you need stuff like that, let me know because I can probably find you some brilliant people to, to fill the gap. Um, and let's talk about the fact that most of our customers were enterprise customers. Enterprise customers are not going to just start using AI to do this stuff. The stakes are too high. I mean, we are talking eight, nine figure deals. AI is not ready for that and the staff responsible for doing this kind of painstaking research and strategy is not going to trust this to AI and, and they're smart not to. So I guess my whole point is there is still a need for a product like Boardroom Insiders. And as I come to the reality that they're not going to sell it back to me, I've thought of maybe I should recreate it. But here's the problem. Enterprise customers. Even if I had 30 customers paying, you know, 150k each at the old Boardroom Insiders, say I was able to get the product back, you know, those would, that would be easy to renew that revenue because they've been working with Boardroom Insiders for years and you can renew those contracts with a minimum of red tape. If I create a new company and recreate the product and it would be a native AI product at this point like we would use AI a lot more, um, it's a new company, right? And if you go and try to get an enterprise deal with Salesforce, it's going to take you like six months to a year, if not more, to, um, be vetted by them, to build relationships with them, even though I'm the same freaking person. I mean, because it's a new entity and they rightly don't trust fly-by-night potentially, you know, companies. They, if they're going to do a deal with you and deploy your technology in freaking Salesforce, they want to make sure that you can handle it, that you can scale, um, they wanna do an info sec, info security, um, investigation to make sure your tech stack is secure and they wanna do a privacy audit to make sure you're in compliance with all these data privacy regulations. I ask me how I know because I've been through it with Boardroom Insiders. So even though we might bring over our entire team and create a new product that's largely the same, supercharged with AI this time, it would be like we're a brand new company and we would have to go through all of that. Well, we could do that, but what does that mean? Well, that means we are not getting revenue while we are, we are waiting for all of that to happen. And so that pre, that introduces a tremendous financial risk for creating a net new brand and product. So, um, I don't know, this is a lot, a lot of questions will come up and I will make more videos to answer them. But I'm also putting this out to all of you to A, see if anyone needs the kind of smart people that were on my team because they're, they're available and B, if anyone has any ideas how I could build this product again, and I mean, I know who's going to build it. I don't need to worry about that. I know who's going to build it and how to do it. I know exactly how to do that. But how can I do this and get customers fast and revenue fast? I just don't know because it really is a product built for enterprise customers and enterprises move really slow on this stuff. And if I'm going to reassemble my team and rebuild the product, we don't have the runway to wait for that.