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UpCounsel's moat: 1M high-intent legal page views a month from SEO
Xavier valued UpCounsel for its durable assets: roughly a million high-intent legal page views a month from organic SEO, with the site ranking #1 for terms like 'Safe Note,' over 10,000 ranked content pages, a solid codebase, and a huge email list.
$1M
UpCounsel organic page views · views/month
“And so in this case, we had an amazing organic SEO. So Mason's one of the best SEO guys in the Valley, and so we had a million high-intent legal page views coming to us every month that, like, if you Google Safe Note, UpCouncil's number one, and it's like in the snippet box”
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Negotiating up from zero: the Founder's Code on a $26M liquidation stack
UpCounsel had already announced shutdown with $26 million in liquidation preferences, meaning the VCs could legally take everything and leave founders with nothing. Xavier paid less than $26M but wrote a contingency voiding the deal if the VCs took the money — abiding by a 'Founder's Code' of not wiping out founders.
“And so, that's— we made a contingency in our offer that our offer would be void if the venture capitalists just took the money. Because we were, you know, if you just read the legal docs, literally, they could take the money, they could, they have a liquidation preference, right? So there were $26 million liquidation preferences on the company. And I can tell you that we paid less than that.”
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Buying UpCounsel attracted more investment than the purchase price
Xavier says new investors found Enduring Ventures over the internet purely because the UpCounsel acquisition looked cool — and the money those investors put into Enduring exceeded what Enduring paid to buy UpCounsel in the first place.
“We actually had new investors who we never would have met before come to us over the internet because they saw we bought Upcounsel and they thought that was so cool. And the amount they've invested in Durin Ventures is actually greater than the amount that we invested to buy the company.”
Steal thisMake your acquisitions public and interesting — a visibly cool deal can pull in more new investor capital than the deal itself cost.