Episode 567 | From Developer to CTO to Buying the Company for $1

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 14 September 2021

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Episode 567, Rob Walling chats with Don Pottinger about joining a company as a developer, transitioning to CTO within 6 months, buying the company for $1, and then later on selling it for a life-changing sum of money. The topics we cover [1:13] Introductions [4:08] Learning to code independently vs learning on the job [06:38] Joining Kevy in 2014 [8:00] Transitioning to Director of Engineering and then to CTO [11:58] Difficulty of laying employees off [14:20] A new CEO and $0 MRR [16:08] Cap table difficulties [19:56] CEO departure and buying the company for $1 [26:30] Starting over and doing it solo [29:01] Running as a lifestyle business and selling the company [35:02] Launching a new startup Links from the show Kevy Langua Talk Don Pottinger (@donpottinger) | Twitter If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Startups for the Rest of Us. I'm Rob Walling. If you read the title of today's
0:05.0	episode and thought that I was getting a little clickbaity, I wasn't. Today is literally the story
0:10.2	of a developer who got a job at a company. He became CTO over the course of six months,
0:16.0	and then he bought the company for a dollar. And later he sold it in 2019. Stick around to hear how he
0:22.4	managed to pull that off. It's a great conversation with Don Pottinger. And the day after this
0:27.4	episode airs, I'll be hosting MicroConf Local in Portland, Oregon. If you're in the area,
0:32.9	I'd love to see you there. And then next week, we're in Boston, then Austin, Texas, and the week after
0:38.7	in Dubrovnik, Croatia. If you're coming to any of these events, please do come up and say hi.
0:44.1	I'd love to meet you. And if you don't have tickets yet, I believe there's still a few remaining.
0:48.4	You can head to microconf.com.com and click on our events section to figure out how to buy tickets.
0:53.4	Again, the microcomf locals are
0:55.0	one-day events and they're quite inexpensive, so it makes the events really accessible. If you're
1:01.3	in the area, I hope to see you there. And with that, let's dive into my conversation.
1:15.3	Don Podinger. Thanks so much for joining me on the show today.
1:17.6	Thanks for having me, Rob. It's a great honor.
1:28.4	You have such a story. Oh, my gosh. Started as a developer, and then you became, was a director of engineering, and then the CTO within six months.
1:31.1	This was a company you came to work for as an employee.
1:34.5	And then you later bought the company for a dollar.
1:37.2	And then you grew it and exited a few years later.
1:39.4	I don't think I've ever heard a story like this.
1:41.1	So this is, it's going to be fun.
1:44.2	Can you give listeners a little bit of background about, you know,
	...

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