Hay-O

Nathan Lacka dropped out of Virginia Tech in 2011 to focus full-time on building Hay-O, a SaaS platform for Facebook apps. His parents supported the decision despite the unconventional path—his mother acknowledged he'd been "running his business out of his classes anyway," so leaving school to pursue it full-time made sense.

Over five years, Lacka and his team built Hay-O into what he describes as "a powerhouse in the Facebook app space." The company grew to over 10,000 paying customers with over $5 million in sales. In 2012, when competitors like Wildfire and BudMedia were exiting, Hay-O maintained a strong cash position and never struggled with payroll. The team had built enough of a financial cushion to theoretically operate for the next 20 months without concern.

At age 26, with a dream of selling a company before turning 30, Nathan received an acquisition offer from one of Hay-O's biggest competitors. The competitor explained they needed a cheaper product offering to complement their expensive enterprise solutions—they saw Hay-O as the perfect fit. Rather than making a unilateral decision, Lacka decided to involve the entire team in the process, showing them deal documents, email chains from competing bidders, and teaching them how M&A negotiations work. He also consulted with key team members: Chris Rieger (head of operations, who had relocated from New York to Blacksburg to build the company) and Christina (head of brand strategy and design).

Chris emphasized the importance of understanding what comes next—there's little point in selling if there's a bigger opportunity being missed in the current business. Christina worried about the Hay-O brand identity and what would happen to customers who had connected with Nathan and the team from the beginning. Both agreed transparency was the right approach, though there was real anxiety about what an acquisition would mean for the team's future and whether employees might leave prematurely out of fear.

Lacka remained undecided, recognizing the pull of multiple considerations: his personal ambition to achieve an exit before 30, his responsibility to investors (including David Cohen from Techstars and a Forbes billionaire), his commitment to his team, and his concerns about customer relationships built over years. He planned to solicit multiple letters of intent to create competitive pressure and improve the offer, then make a final decision with full team input. The tension between declaring victory and pursuing potentially bigger opportunities remained unresolved.