A big exit marks the beginning of a new era for our studio
IPS, the managed cloud partner for the creative and innovative industry, has been acquired by Total Webhosting Solutions (TWS). IPS became part of the We Are Builders family in 2015 and was one of the first companies within our studio portfolio. Their acquisition is a major exit for We Are Builders, and marks an exciting new era for IPS to grow and scale-up.
Exit! Exit! Read all about it
Software and cloud infrastructure have always been a big part of my entrepreneurial life. IPS was one of the first companies I founded a while ago. And as you might know, we run a startup studio called Builders which basically is a company that builds companies. IPS joined our studio in 2015, back then the company was already running smoothly and was financially sound. Yet, it needed a lot more punch to stand out from the crowd.
Because I’ve always been running companies in parallel, my partners and I needed a model to scale and grow all our companies at the same time.
We asked ourselves; how can one make sure all companies keep evolving and growing in our portfolio? As you can imagine with this portfolio management, challenges arise at spades; how to build world-class products, attract the right co-founders, scale up sales, put out effective marketing, create a great culture, recruit a kick-ass team and engineer growth.
So how does one make companies scale in parallel, at different stages and all experiencing uncalculated growth spurts? We decided to build up our companies and develop a model simultaneously; a bold and intense move as we later experienced. This way, the learnings from the most thriving companies could be passed on to other companies down the line.
Through this journey, we’ve put this model in a playbook with the right milestones to encourage growth while maintaining entrepreneurial freedom for everybody to take their responsibility. We soon found ourselves with more companies, more co-founders and more ideas then we could effectively run at current capacity.
In later articles, I’ll take you down the rabbit hole called company building and amuse you with all our learnings and successes. Follow our studio here on LinkedIn or here on Medium.
Spin-out timing
So back to IPS; when we started talking with TWS at the beginning of this year about their vision of the cloud landscape and plans for the future, we were surprised how close it aligned with ours. Since IPS has been around for a decade, we strongly felt it was the right time to spin IPS out of the studio and let them scale-up under new ownership. With this move, IPS has enough stomping power to become Europe’s biggest badass managed cloud partner for the creative and innovative industry. You can follow their journey here.
My Oscar moment
With all this said I’d like to thank the amazing team at IPS for building such a great company with the most outstanding customer base you’ll ever see. Big shoutout to Robin, Richard, Sharon, Sharon, Joyce and the Builders studio team involved in the growth and acquisition of IPS. I am super excited to watch IPS grow under new ownership in 2020 and beyond.
So, what’s next? Our startup studio has been around for a few years now, and this exit allows us to pursue a path we’ve been carving out for a while. I’m really proud to share this exciting news at We Are Builders.
It’s time to launch our studio fund
We’ve founded We Are Builders in 2015 as a way to leverage our hands-on experience to help founders build and launch remarkable technology companies. Over the last five years, we’ve explored the startup studio model in-and-out and launched dozens of software products in the process. After tons of learnings, we are excited to announce our first studio fund, a vehicle to build and fund our next series of studio-born ventures.
With the funds from this exit, we’re looking for visionary investors and exit founders to join our next adventure. We’re focused on the future of work, or what we call life at work. So a shameless plug: be one of the first to invest in our studio, and as a bonus get exclusive access to our venture deal-flow.
Sign up for more details about our fund here.
