Never sacrifice your reputation for money – even when the money is tempting. A real-world founder story about staying true to your values.

The main purpose of a business is to make money. If you cannot generate profits after an initial build-up phase, it’s questionable if your company has a right to exist.

That’s the capitalistic and economic view, and I fully align with this view.

Our former president of the board had a saying:

Business is easy: Revenues up, costs down. What’s so difficult about this?

This might sound placative, but he is right. Being profitable comes from — guess what — higher revenues at lower costs. Improving capital efficiency is a standing task for all entrepreneurs.

Building a business is a rollercoaster and never a straight line of progress. Sometimes, unforeseen problems appear and cost you tons of money. Sometimes, economic and market conditions change and pose new threats or open up new opportunities.

As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I’ve been in this game for many years. I have dealt with many unforeseen problems, and I have seen economic and market conditions change.

Now what does this have to do with reputation? Read on to hear a true story of how changing market conditions provided a real test for the founder’s core values.

The Market

In our domain, we have seen a market consolidation over the last two years. One of the key players in our space started acquiring adjacent businesses. We appeared on their radar for the first time in 2023, when we politely declined a deeper conversation.

In 2024, we had several companies reaching out to us to explore potential avenues to join forces — i.e., to acquire our business. The key player mentioned above was one of them; in the meantime, they had already acquired a couple of other businesses.

Based on the interest and the changing market dynamics, we decided to enter a deeper conversation with some of those interested companies.

The Proposal

After talking to all the interested companies, we ended up entering into a letter of intent with the company that reached out to us already in 2023.

The intention was to build a next-generation product together, incorporating the best of both worlds. That sounded compelling.

They asked me what would scare me so much that I would walk away from the deal. I said, office politics and if our team wouldn’t have a bright future in the new setting. They acknowledged my statements, which sounded even more compelling.

We signed the letter of intent and dived into the due diligence. The due diligence was strenuous, but very structured and progressed well. Until that famous last call.

The End

We dialed into a call with the subject “founder roles”. In contrast to all the previous calls, there wasn’t a clear agenda, and the call started very unstructured. Half an hour into the call, I asked what was the purpose of the call. “Uhm, ehm, ahm, we need you to come up with a team draw-down plan.” My co-founders and I had a puzzled look on our faces and asked a few clarification questions.

They confirmed that they wanted us to fire the entire team and that only the three co-founders would survive the transaction. They also confirmed they would look to migrate all our customers to their half-finished next-generation product we thought we would build together.

I (literally) told them that building the next big shit together would still be a very compelling perspective for us, but building the next big shit without our team would just be big shit.

They didn’t appreciate it. They kicked us out of the call and it was the last time we ever spoke.

What Survived from This Experience

The three of us walked away from this transaction without sleeping over it. What’s the point of drawing red lines when you don’t respect them? What’s the point of core values, when you sacrifice them for the perspective of cashing out personally?

I always had strong core values, and I never ever in my life sacrificed my values or my reputation for money. How should I have looked straight into the eyes of my team and into the eyes of my customers if I would have sold them out, at my personal financial benefit?

I am eternally grateful that my co-founders share my core values. That matters much more to me than a quick personal financial benefit.