Lesson's learned from Yvon Chouinard and Patagonia

In 2022, Yvon Chouinard didn’t sell Patagonia and he didn’t take it public. He gave it away. The New York Times valued the company at about $3 billion, and the family still owed about $17.5 million in gift taxes to hand it off, according to Bloomberg.

This episode tells how a climber who made gear out of his car built a company he never wanted to run. It covers how Patagonia almost went under in 1991, and why being on the Forbes billionaires list made him so angry. Then it walks through the steps. He wrote the mission into the company decades early. He gave his team a deadline. He turned down a sale and an IPO. And he spent 2 years building a new structure: the votes went to a trust the family runs, and the profits went to a nonprofit that fights climate change.

We also look at the critics, the money that’s gone out since, and why his daughter now chairs the board.

Lesson's taken from the full length episode of Broadcast.com, released last Monday

Episode 2 of Founders Last Call looks at Broadcast.com, the internet radio and video company Mark Cuban and Todd Wagner built, and the Yahoo deal that made them rich.

Yahoo signed it on March 31, 1999 and announced it April 1, at an exchange ratio of 0.7722 Yahoo shares per Broadcast.com share. We walk through the steps they took to get to that exit, why a money-losing company was worth that much to a buyer, and what the deal looked like once the dot-com bubble burst.

If you’re a founder thinking about when to sell, this one is about reading the moment.

n 1999, Ben & Jerry’s reported sales of $237 million, up 13.3% from the year before, but net income was only $3.4 million after an $8.6 million restructuring charge. In this short episode, we look at the financials and the specifics behind why the company’s price rose so high in 2000.

We cover the bids in the company’s SEC filings. Ben Cohen’s investor group offered $32 a share in February 2000, and a joint proposal from Unilever, Meadowbrook, and Cohen came in at $38 in March, which is the price the deal closed at. We also cover the $11.4 million termination fee in the merger agreement, and the lessons founders can take for their own exits.