Delivering Happiness

partnership, but everyone who said it sounded smarter so we liked to use
that phrase a lot.)
To our surprise, all three of the companies said they were interested in
possibly investing in our mezzanine round of financing. Even more
surprising, Netscape and Microsoft both said that they were even more
interested in buying the entire company outright.
We told them that the price tag was going to be at least $250 million.
I’m not sure how we came up with that number, but it sounded good to me,

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and I guess it was a good sign that Netscape and Microsoft both said they
wanted to continue talking.
They ended up getting into a bidding war.
In the end, Microsoft offered the biggest number—$265 million—but
there were some strings attached to it. They wanted Sanjay, Ali, and me to
stay with LinkExchange for at least another twelve months. If I stayed the
entire time, then I would walk away with close to $40 million. If I didn’t,
then I would have to give up about 20 percent of that amount.
Even though LinkExchange was no longer fun for me, I figured that I
could stick around for another year at that rate. I just had to do the bare
minimum amount of work so that I wouldn’t get fired.
This practice of sticking around but not really doing anything was
actually pretty common practice in Silicon Valley in acquisition scenarios.
In fact, there’s even a phrase that entrepreneurs use for this: “Vest In
Peace.”
The deal was signed a few weeks after our negotiations with Microsoft
began. Compared with other acquisitions that Microsoft had done, the
LinkExchange acquisition was done in record time, despite some behind-
the-scenes drama internally.
Without getting into too much detail (and to protect the guilty), it was an
education to me in human behavior and character. Large amounts of money
have a strange way of getting people’s true colors to come out. I observed
the greed of certain people who had joined the company right before the
acquisition trying to negotiate side contracts for themselves at the risk and
expense of everyone else in the company. There was a lot of drama as
people started fighting and trying to maximize the financial outcome only
for themselves.
For myself personally, I decided to step away from the drama. It only
confirmed in my mind that selling the company was the right thing to do, as
I certainly did not want to be working with many of these people ever
again. I just had to stick it through another twelve months.
One day in early November 1998, Sanjay and I went to lunch together at
a restaurant a few blocks away from the LinkExchange office. The
acquisition had already been covered by the press a couple of weeks earlier,
but the deal had not yet officially closed. As we were finishing up our meal,

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Alfred called me on my cell phone and told me that it was now official. The
deal had closed.
I looked at Sanjay and gave him the news. “Well, I guess the deal
closed,” I said. Both of us felt the same way. We weren’t excited. We
weren’t cheering. We knew the outside world probably thought we were
jumping up and down and doing cartwheels, but instead our mood was a
strange mix of apathy and relief. The excitement of LinkExchange had
disappeared long ago. Now we just had the drudgery of sticking around
uninspired and unmotivated for another twelve months.
“I guess we should probably walk back to the office then,” I said.
“Okay.”
And so we did, in silence.