After becoming a member of Amazon as a product chief in 2022, I noticed a series of layoffs and return-to-office mandates over the next three years that made any semblance of presence in dwelling life unattainable. The tech business layoffs disproportionately impacted ladies, and the employees that remained struggled in a office with lowered morale and elevated expectations.
Then I stumbled upon the entrepreneurship via acquisition house. The ETA premise is easy: Moderately than founding an organization from scratch or climbing another person’s ladder, you purchase an present, worthwhile enterprise.
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I spent the final 12 months of my Amazon tenure looking for my first enterprise to buy, with a imaginative and prescient for a holding firm that included incubated and bought corporations. In June 2025, with the assistance of a Small Enterprise Administration (SBA) acquisition mortgage, I purchased DiggyPOD, a $10 million e book printing enterprise based in 1988. This Could, I added Lengthy Overdue Books, a vibrant e book writer with a number of notable titles, to my acquisition portfolio. I’m increasing these companies into a world media group supporting content material creators.
I’ve devoted the final 12 months to empowering different tech business veterans to buy companies. Listed below are my three explanation why it is a compelling possibility for this demographic:
1. Uniquely favorable financing and odds
The SBA provides acquisition financing on phrases unmatched by the open market. This mechanism put my $10 million DiggyPOD acquisition inside attain on a construction constructed round a month-to-month cost I may dwell with. Potential acquirers ought to know that this financing comes with a private assure, however the due diligence course of required by the lenders and the SBA provides these offers a greater probability than bootstrapped or venture-backed companies. Acquisitions are dramatically safer than startups. A Yale College of Administration examine discovered that between 2019 and 2023, SBA business-acquisition loans defaulted at just 1.22%, versus the 50% of tech businesses that fail of their first 5 years.
2. Your company expertise are the asset
The week after I bought DiggyPOD, our million-dollar inkjet coloration printer, the crown jewel of the store, broke down. I had no thought repair it, however I didn’t must. Thankfully, I inherited a crew with a mixed 100-plus years of print expertise who run manufacturing. My years of hiring technical expertise enabled me to ask sufficient inquiries to ask the fitting ones, and perceive the producer service agreements. I introduced the abilities {that a} profession in tech trains us for relentlessly: buyer discovery, crew management, and AI fluency. That operator muscle that feels generic inside a startup or in massive tech is the core competency for operating an acquired enterprise. After operating DiggyPOD for a 12 months, I’ve revamped the tech stack fully for progress; put in a tech-forward government crew, together with a Head of AI); and repeatedly, programmatically ensured buyer success.
3. The trustworthy case on your life
I can’t fake the transition was simple. Within the early months, with a fancy manufacturing operation to study, and a crew in Michigan to win over, I noticed my children much less, no more. However shopping for into established money circulation is a basically completely different proposition than chasing it. A startup founder spends years racing the runway, hoping income arrives earlier than the cash runs out. I purchased right into a worthwhile enterprise, which suggests the query is now not, “Will this survive?” however, “How do I wish to develop it?”
Once I joined Amazon, I set three nonnegotiables as a father or mother: I’d be there when my children wakened, there after they bought dwelling from faculty, and there to place them to mattress. The tech business made these unattainable to honor. Possession is the one construction I discovered that lets me construct that life by myself phrases. The trail is just not with out threat, and it calls for actual work earlier than the liberty arrives. However for tech veterans observing one other layoff cycle or return-to-office mandate, I wish to be the voice that claims there may be another choice.
I took it, and you may too.
