The Geoloqi Acquisition: Leading a Competitive Bid Without Missing a Beat
"A three-way bidding war is a leadership problem before it's a legal one."
Situation : I was COO at Geoloqi, an early-stage startup running on angel and venture funding - marketing, sales, HR, finance, and operations all sat with me. We had live paid pilots with brands like AT&T, American Express, and PepsiCo, and had raised more than $1M across our rounds.
Problem : A few different companies showed interest in acquiring us around the same time. My job was to turn that interest into a real competitive process - one that would get the best outcome for our founders, investors, and employees - without letting the day-to-day business stall while we did it. Product still had to ship. Pilots still had to run. Diligence requests kept landing.
What I Did
Structured and ran a competitive-bid process across three prospective acquirers, in parallel with normal operations, not instead of them.
Kept marketing, sales, HR, finance, and operations running through the whole process so our story to acquirers stayed intact.
Led the strategy, negotiation, and diligence myself, end to end, through to close.
Result : We closed with Esri in a deal that was a profitable exit for our founders, investors, and employees - the outcome I'd set out to get for a company that had raised more than $1M to reach that point.
Lesson
What I took from it : The operating discipline that gets a company through a transaction cleanly is the same discipline that should be running the company on a normal Tuesday. If it isn't already there, a transaction is where the gap gets expensive.