Selling a Startup, Buying It Back, and Changing How Founders Raise: A Founder's Story
episode
Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
20 min
1 speaker
5 chapters
transcribed 5 days ago
Transcript
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Startup Success, the podcast for startup founders and investors. Here you'll find stories of success from others in the trenches as they work to scale some of the fastest growing startups in the world. Stories that will help you in your own journey. Startup Success starts now.
Welcome to Startup Success. In this episode, I sit down with Jacqueline Johnson, founder of Create and Cultivate and co-founder of Cherub, to talk about what it really looks like to build, exit, and then in this situation, rebuild a company. From selling, create, and cultivate for $22 million to PE to buying it back just a few years. Later, Jacqueline shares the lessons founders need to know about private equity, ownership, and control. We then dive into how they're rethinking early stage angel fundraising with Cherub, what's changing in today's startup landscape, and what it takes to really stand out with angel investors in an AI-driven world. Welcome. Jacqueline. So Jacqueline, we have so much to cover, but I want to start with create and cultivate and kind of your background and what led to the founding.
So a long time ago now, but I had actually started a different company. It was called No Subject. It was a marketing events influencer. Before influencers were called influencer agency. And really was working with different clients, ranging from beauty, fashion, tech, was a first-time founder, was in my early, early 20s, making a lot of mistakes like founders do. And really there was nothing at that time, and this is like 2010 timing that looked Or spoke to me as a young millennial female founder. There wasn't that many resources. There definitely wasn't events. And so I created something called Crate and Cultivate as a side project through the agency to get women together, get offline, do a little retreat, workshops, speakers, dinners.
And it really started as like a small 25-person thing. And then year over year it kept growing. Brands were getting more interested. People were expecting. excited. There was 50 people and then 100 people and then cut to 2016. I actually sold that agency and then went full time basically trying to build, create and cultivate into something even bigger.
Better. Awesome. And what caught our attention that's so unique is you ended up selling it, right? To PE. Yeah. Yeah.
So Creighton Colt Day was completely bootstrapped. Um, we raised no outside capital. We had really, really insane growth. I would say the founding started in 2015, which is when we were like, okay, let's take this seriously as a business. And then really up until 2019, we were doing 14 million in revenue, 4 million IBITA, just really crushing year over year. 2020, we were on track to do 25 million in revenue. And obviously, we know what happens. COVID hit, but we ended up doing quite well during COVID and pivoting into more of like a digital footprint. And we ended up selling to PE top of 2021.
that hard to come to that conclusion? Cause I know a lot of for a lot of founders listening, like it's your baby, right? You've been there through the whole rise and to just kind of take that step is a big deal.
Yeah, it was interesting. We had like an interesting kind of up and down with selling the business. We had really early interest in 2018. So at that point we're like three-ish years in. We're eight to ten people, I think. We're doing probably like eight million to ten million in revenue, but like growing really fast, had a lot of inbound interest. So we actually went through a process in 2018, which really was a great thing for the business to do because it got us very organized. We were able to Tell our story in a really compelling way. And we got a bunch of LOIs. We ended up going with a public company. You know, obviously the diligence around that was really intense. And then it ended up not working out and falling through, which was devastating.
But at the time it was like, okay, we were still fresh and young enough that it was like easy for us to bounce back. A lot of the reason that one fell apart was because of the lack of C-suite around me.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:01–4:44
2
What is the background and inspiration behind creating Create & Cultivate?
4:44–8:41
3
How did Jaclyn scale Create & Cultivate to a multi‑million‑dollar bootstrapped business?
8:41–10:10
4
What were the key factors and trade‑offs when deciding to sell to private equity?
10:10–14:17
5
Why did the private‑equity deal fall apart and how did COVID impact the sale process?
14:17–20:51
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Startup Success: A Podcast for Founders & Investors
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