Felena Hanson sat down with Amita Goyal, to discuss the sale of her influencer management workflow platform.
Amita Goyal is the CEO and cofounder of Playback, a tech startup based in NYC working with brands to help them grow. She recently exited her first company, which focuses on influencer workflow tools. She is continuing to support with the acquisition and is also working on helping small businesses grow through an interactive video platform.
Prior to her own startup, Amita spent over a decade on wall street (Merrill Lynch, Oppenheimer and UBS) in management consulting (Boston Consulting Group), and in startups (Wework).
Outside of work, Amita enjoys strength training, hiking, reading and exploring NYCs art scene.
Additional advice from Amita
- There were many investors on the other side, and the deal was going back and forth; it almost got cancelled because one of their investors didn’t like the dilution
- It was hard to run the company as CEO (do sales, ops, etc) and do acquisition legal and accounting – was feeling pretty burnt out
- There was a lot of emotion about whether we should sell or not, because we were attached to what we were building and would lose some autonomy, but, net/net, it was a win-win
- We didn’t hire a tax attorney, and luckily the other side had one, but if we didn’t value the equity shares accordingly, we would have a surprise tax bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars for our taxes.
- It always takes longer; initially, we thought it would be one month per the lawyers, but it took almost four months.
- Since we had so many pivots, we built multiple products. I carved out all the video tech for my own LLC because I wasn’t taking a salary for almost 1.5 years and only sold the influencer management piece. And then we decided to sell; our investors were fine with it. So other founders can do this too.
