Agora Labs is Acquired By Talent Protocol
I’m excited to officially announce that my startup Agora Labs has been acquired by Talent Protocol (A $50M Dollar Company). 🎉
☁️ My previous company was amongst the leading token rewards platforms, scaling to thousands of users and to date has received over $100K+ in investments (including top blockchains such as Harmony and DeSo) and we’ve now sold our startup to a company with a seasoned founding team who is equally as passionate about our original web3 mission.
As part of the acquisition, I will be joining Talent Protocol in October.
In this post, I will be sharing the journey of getting my company acquired (all the details will be revealed 😉).
Where It All Began ✌🏼
It all began through a mutual connection from YC Startup School where I was intro’d to Filipe Macedo (CMO of Talent Protocol). We had a quick ~30 mins call about the social token space and predictions we have for web3.
A couple of weeks later, Filipe invited me to join a Twitter Space to chat about my web3 career [tweet 🐦]. This is the first of many times that Talent Protocol left a lasting positive impression on me.
Little did I know that this single Twitter Space about web3 careers would (ironically) set up the foundation for the next stage of my career… 💼
Scaling to Thousands of Token Users (January-May) 🏆
From January to May we were running PMF experiments and from our new capital (thanks to Harmony Protocol, Envision, etc.) and we were quickly expanding the team.
This is also around the time I got accepted into the inaugural crypto cohort for ZFellows where I had the opportunity to be mentored by some of the Silicon Valley legends.
I also accelerated my founder journey by joining Envision Accelerator (Batch 5), 0xKernel (Batch 5), Crypto Culture and Society (Batch 2), and SafaryClub (Batch 1)
I’m used to the typical startup pace, but with the web3 economy, it’s at a whole other level. I was both surprised and proud of the speed we were able to scale and grow.
The Founder Golden Ticket (May-June) 🎟
Then in June, we got the golden ticket to the founder world:
We got an interview for the Y-Combinator 2022 Summer Batch! 🤯
Getting into Y-Combinator has been a huge dream of mine, and getting even an interview was a huge achievement for me.
We booked the interview and over the next couple of days began preparing for it.
The Y-Combinator interview was probably one of the most intense and relieving 10 minutes I’ve ever gone through in my tech career. 🦄
In typical YC fashion, a couple of hours after the interview you would receive your decision — I was constantly refreshing my email just waiting for the email to come through.
Then an email popped into my inbox [📭]:
“Unfortunately, we’ve decided not to fund Agora Labs this batch. This was a difficult decision because we thought you were impressive… I was concerned that there wouldn’t be a lot of progress in this nascent market “
Although we weren’t accepted, it allowed me to check one more box in my founder checklist ✅
Yet, once again, we realized that the scalability of the web3 token market was a limitation in potential progress.
Crypto Crash + Limitations in Social Tokens 🚧
This was also around the time that crypto started crashing. 🔻
We also started to notice some scaleability problems with Social Tokens.
Many other crypto enthusiasts were noticing these patterns as well including Eliot from Coinvise who shared similar thoughts on why Social Tokens are shifting to Community Tokens [📑].
I also had a chat with a mentor/advisor Sunita Rao (who was previously head of tokenization at Republic) and she perfectly summed up our scaleability problem:
“You’re building the equivalence of Virtual Reality in 2012, it’s genius but the market just isn’t there (yet).”
With startups, TIMING is a quarter of the battle. ⏰
Making the Decision to Sell 😼
It was around this time that I had a call with my mentor and he suggested looking into the idea of a strategic exit (acquisition).
I previously had this view that selling a company was a sign of failure. But in reality, it is a launchpad for many startup companies.
Over the next 3 weeks, I learned as much as I could about doing an acquisition process, valuing your startup, to negotiating offers.
Here is one of my all-time favourite quote from doing an acquisition:
You have a 1% chance of building a unicorn. We’re here to support the other 99% of startups. — Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire
Although I didn’t sell my startup through MicroAcquire, their articles and videos were a HUGE help in guiding me through the whole process.
By the end of the 5-week sprint, we had 4 offers from companies who wanted to acquire us. All of the companies that offered to acquire us were in the web3 space, with a mix of stealth startups and multi-million dollar companies. 🚀
For us, it was clear that the ideal company to acquire us was Talent Protocol. From the beginning of our conversations to signing the deal, they always had our best interests at heart and I truly resonated with their mission and culture. ❤
After all the legal documents were signed we began the 2-week PR sprint where I was interviewed about the acquisition by my favourite tech articles and podcasts.
This leads us to today, where we have officially made the announcement — my startup has gotten acquired! 🥳
I’m unbelievably grateful for where I am today and I feel like it is the perfect launchpad for the next stage of my life. ✨
🎉 Shout Outs & Recognition
Building a company has been the most rewarding, and hyper-growth endeavour I’ve ever undertaken.
This is undoubtedly one of the biggest and most surreal moments of my life. I wanted to take a moment to recognize the people that made this all possible.
🦄 — Foremost, I want to thank my fellow co-founders who I built this company with — Charles, Jerry, and Freeman. Thank you for being such inspirational builders and setting such a high bar for the software we built. But most importantly thank you for always believing in the mission and having as much passion for this startup as I did.
👨🏻💻 — Beyond the founding team, we brought lots of people and teammates into our circles. Special recognition to Jason Aantwi-Appah, Ryan Haraki, Ayush Pathak, Nima Pourjafar, Layss Majed and Krish Nerkar for being our first employees and for believing in me and the company.
🎟 — I also want to give a huge thank you to Pedro, Francisco, Filipe, and the whole Talent Protocol team. They were incredibly supportive and transparent throughout this whole process and I always felt they had our best interests in mind. I truly resonate with the culture & vibe of Talent Protocol and it was clear they were the ideal company to acquire us.
💰 — Thank you to the investors who took a bet on me and my company — I learned so much throughout this whole process and plan on building another company in the future.
❤️ —Finally, I want to give a HUGE shoutout to my mentors, advisors, family and friends. Doing an acquisition was a new process for me and I had incredible people like Behailu Tekletsadik, and Aram Attar guide me in their own founder experiences.
There were so many people that had a part in this acquisition so a quick thank you to all of them! 🤍
🔮 What’s Next?
As part of the acquisition, I will be joining Talent Protocol starting in October.
I’ve also just released a blog post [🧵] about my long-term goals for my career which covers how I’m optimizing for the next 5 years of my life.
👉 You can read it [here].
I cannot express to share how excited I am to take this next step in my career!
Original Post is on my Personal Blog 🚀
If you enjoyed reading this and want monthly updates on my life/career you can join my monthly newsletter 💌
