From Slow-Starter to $100 Million Fortune 500 Exit : Yasen Dimitrov

What does it take to turn a startup into a $100 million exit?

For Yasen Dimitrov, the Co-founder of IntelligenceNODE, the answer is one word: patience

In this episode, Yasen shares the unvarnished story of his 12-year journey from the predictable path of Boston Consulting Group to the chaos of the startup world. He recounts starting IntelligenceNODE in a one-bedroom Mumbai apartment with the grand vision of being the "Bloomberg for Retail," only to face a market that wasn't ready.

He gets candid about the startup being a self-described "slow-starter," the continuous 12-year fundraising struggle, and the bizarre moment during the 2021 funding craze when his company's steady growth was a disadvantage.

Yasen then walks us through the entire M&A process, from the decision to hire a banker to navigating multiple offers and closing the deal with Fortune 500 company, IPG.

This is a masterclass in resilience, strategic pivoting, and the art of engineering a successful exit.

Agenda:

• Career Catalysts: How a "tough boss" early in his career provided invaluable lessons and why the moment he "stopped learning" at BCG was the trigger to start his own company. 

• The Co-founder Journey: Finding his co-founder at a previous company and the keys to maintaining a successful partnership for over a decade. 

• Pivoting the Vision: The evolution from the initial idea of a "Bloomberg for Retail" to providing critical competitive intelligence that the market was actually ready for.

• Go-to-Market Strategy:

  • The "slow-starter" phase and the persistence required to pivot geographically from India, to the Middle East, to Europe, before finding product-market fit in the US. 

  • The playbook for cracking the US market: combining "air miles" to be physically present with authentic, direct outreach on LinkedIn. 

  • Why the US market is unique in its willingness to "give chances" to unknown startups.

• The Fundraising Marathon:

  • How they successfully raised over $20 million by focusing on what VCs
    really want: paying customers.

  • The reality of being in a "continuous fundraise" for 12 years to fuel steady growth.

• The M&A Playbook:

• Why hiring a top-tier M&A advisor is non-negotiable, turning their exit strategy into a process with ten options and five firm offers. 

• How a strategic acquisition is like a "marriage": IPG needed their commerce technology, and they needed a partner to help scale it. A critical insight for founders: when selling to a large corporation, focus on the value of your tech and team, not just revenue. 

• The reality that acquisitions take time—their process took 12 months from the first meeting to the final close. 

• The most important lesson for a founder during an M&A process: always assume the deal will fail and continue building your business to maintain a position of strength.

Memorable Quotes

"If you don't feel that you are learning in intelligence, no, then just go do something else. Otherwise, what's the point?" 

"There's no shortcut to that. You need to go talk to clients, fail miserably, and then move, keep believing that what you're doing is the right thing to do." 

"If a big acquirer gets stuck on your revenue growth for your particular startup, I would think twice. They should not be acquiring you for the revenue. They should be acquiring you for the technology and for the know-how of the team." 

"You always need to consider that this thing will fail and it will fall through. And if you don't, if you put all your eggs in one basket, then you're more likely than to kind of be in a position to surrender certain things at the end."