Five exits by the age of 39 🤯

Welcome to The Wise Exit (brought to you by Exitwise).

Starting this week, we’re changing up our regularly scheduled programming.

Every Wednesday, we’ll be bringing you the stories of founders that have achieved impressive exits, explaining exactly how they did it, and walking you through the lessons that you can take away and apply toward your own business.

Today, we’re telling the incredible story of technologist, futurist, and serial entrepreneur Ben Lamm.

At the young age of 39, Ben has already sold five companies and is currently tackling one of the most interesting and audacious projects we’ve come across.

His is a story of escalating bets, savvy strategies, and an incredibly productive business partnership.

So, without further ado, let’s dive in…

The College (Almost) Dropout

Ben got his start in the business world as a college student at Baylor University.

In his senior year, he founded Simply Interactive - a “e-learning” company that created interactive digital training programs for businesses.

His first venture, it would also be his first glimpse of the power (and exit-potential) of B2B software applications.

Genentech, the company he was interning at that year, would be his first large customer, and many more Fortune 500 companies (including Dell, Rand, Michelin, and Exxon) would soon follow.

His success in acquiring this caliber of client quickly caught the attention of another, larger e-learning company, Agile Interactive, which would purchase Simply Interactive in 2011.

It was Lamm’s first taste, and it would be the first of four exits that he would achieve over a 7-year period.

Almost more impressively, he finished out the school year.

Taser Drones, Mobile Games, and A 9-Figure Partnership

In 2010, Lamm co-founded Chaotic Moon - a creative tech studio focused on building innovative software/hardware for companies like Microsoft, Fox, Pizza Hut and more.

The Chaotic Moon team regularly found themselves in the news for their innovative and future-forward projects, including:

• A ‘Smart Cart’ developed for Whole Foods 🍏

• A taser drone ⚡

• And an ahead-of-its-time VR shark-fighting game (appropriately-named Shark Punch 🦈)
  

Chaotic Moon is also where Lamm would begin his partnership with fellow serial-entrepreneur Andrew Busey.

Busey had recently left his executive role at Zynga, the mobile gaming giant he had sold Challenge Games to in 2010.

Busey served in a Partner role at Chaotic Moon and, three years in, Busey and Lamm co-founded their own mobile gaming company, Team Chaos.

Here again, they leveraged partnerships with big brands and IPs like the NBA and Rooster Teeth, very quickly amassing a large player base and a name for themselves in a space where Busey was already established and experienced.

The team sold both firms back to back (Chaotic Moon in 2015, and Team Chaos in 2016) both for undisclosed amounts.

Pivoting to AI (Before It Was Cool)

After the sales of sister companies Chaotic Moon and Team Chaos, Lamm and Busey moved on to what they saw as the next big frontier: AI.

They founded Conversable, a startup focused on building conversational AI applications for enterprise clients - this time, companies in the service and hospitality industries like McDonalds, TGI Fridays, Pizza Hut, and Dunkin Donuts.

It’s important to keep in mind, this was all the way back in 2016 - well before the mainstream popularity of AI and the widely-acknowledged viability of business use cases that we take for granted in the age of ChatGPT

Quickly snapped up by LivePerson in 2018, this would be Lamm’s fourth exit in a 7 year period. He was only 37 years old, and had generated $200M worth of enterprise value.

Lamm and Busey had seen what AI could do for businesses, and so, almost like clockwork, they were ready to start building again.

The Latest, But Almost Certainly Not The Last

Following the successful sale of Conversable, Lamm and Busey launched yet another business - Hypergiant.

Leaning on the pair’s learnings from Conversable, Hypergiant would (at least initially) be focused on developing custom AI applications for businesses.

Following the playbook of their past successes, they immediately secured and leveraged partnerships with household name brands and past partners - clients like TGI Fridays, for whom they produced Flanagan, an AI-powered mixologist.

It wasn’t long, however, until Hypergiant pivoted from AI-generated cocktails to exactly what you’d probably guess… building critical solutions for the national defense infrastructure.

Hypergiant found a great deal of success in building AI-powered solutions to space & defense challenges, including their flagship product CommandCenter.

By now, you should know where this is going…

Earlier this month, Trive Capital, a Texas-based PE firm with an already-impressive portfolio of companies working on defense solutions, acquired Hypergiant.

A fifth acquisition for Lamm, and the fourth consecutive acquisition for the Lamm/Busey partnership.

What Did We Learn?

Well, first of all, we learned that these guys are unstoppable.

You’ll be happy to know that, after selling Hypergiant, they’re taking a bit of a break and working on something a little lighter.

Namely, bringing long-extinct species back to life through genetic engineering.

But what can we learn from their consistent success in selling the companies they’ve built?

A few lessons we can take from their story:

• Building with enterprise clients in mind seems to pay off big

• A good partnership, especially one with a co-founder that has previous M&A experience, can be worth hundreds of millions of dollars

• When coming back for Round 2 or 3, apply your experience and step up your bets

You can bet we’ll be keeping a close eye on Ben and Andrew’s next projects.

If you’re reading The Wise Exit, we’re sure it won’t be too long until you hear about them again.

Cashing Out: A Conversation With Oliver Low

Every exit has a story... and we're here to help tell them…

Oliver Low currently runs Tiny Studio, a venture studio that sits within Tiny.com. Tiny is a holding company which was started to invest in and acquire companies. Oliver now sits at the center of helping make the Tiny portfolio companies grow.

In this week’s episode of the Cashing Out podcast, Oliver walks us through:

• Finding the right buyer for your startup (private equity, family office, strategic buyer, or holding company)

• The value of surrounding yourself with M&A expertise when selling your business

• How selling in the "4th inning" can often lead to better liquidity and professional options

M&A News 📰

Read news around large/notable acquisitions from the last week.

National Defense: $5.6bn cash acquisition of Ball Aerospace moves Global Defence Manufacturer, BAE Systems, into the space sector

Tech: OpenAI makes first public acquisition in 7-years by snapping up AI design studio Global Illumination

Sustainable Energy: Apollo Funds (NYSE: APO) furthers its commitment to investing $50 billion in clean energy and climate capital by 2027 with latest acquisition of CATEC

That’s it for this week.

We hope you had as much fun reading about Ben and Andrew’s story as much as we did researching it.

Tune in next Wednesday for another deep dive, and have a great rest of the week 👋