Adeo Ressi: The Guy Who Sold Two Companies Before The Age Of 30

To take their new businesses up the ladder of successes it’s essential for the young entrepreneurs to take inspiration from the best of the entrepreneurial world. For that purpose, you have to read about many successful entrepreneurs and how they achieved what they have. A mix of their experiences and your own passion will definitely take you to the top of the business world.

Adeo Ressi is one of the entrepreneurs that you can take inspiration from. He is the guy who sold two companies for $1 billion when he was still in his late twenties.

Adeo Ressi 

Adeo Ressi is an American entrepreneur and investor. He is the CEO of The Founder Institute. A start-up launch program that operates in over 200 cities across the world. Apart from that, he is a recognized mentor for fast-growing technology startups or businesses.

He also has pioneered innovations in the protection of the founder’s rights the raising of early-stage capital and scaling of new businesses.

Adeo Ressi|  Photo Credits: Forbes

Early life and Education

Adeo Ressi is an Italian American and his full name Adeodato Gregory Ressi di Cervia. He was raised in New York’s Upper West Side.

When he was a child he asked his parents to send him Arcosanti, an experimental town in Arizona rather than sending him to summer camp.

He spent four summers in Acrosanti, as a youngest working resident. He often performed menial jobs like cleaning out sewage pipes. His experiences at Acrosanti got him interested in environmental issues and helped in setting his career path to some degree.

Adeo Ressi attended the University of Pennsylvania. Where he spent time as a housemate with the Co-Founder of Paypal, Elon Musk.

In their time at the University Ressi and Elon Musk opened an unofficial nightclub at their house. That hosted as many as 500 patron a night.

As an undergraduate Adeo Ressi founded the Social Revolutionary Club and also started an environmental-themed paper called Green Times.

After spending four years in college as an environmental studies major he failed to receive his degree because he wanted to use copies of his paper, Green times as his senior thesis instead of writing a traditional paper.

Career

After ending his collegiate career, Ressi moved on to pursue his career as an entrepreneur 

1994- Adeo Ressi co-founded a localized news website called “Total New York”.

Which was later bought by America online in 1997 for an undisclosed amount of money and renamed it from Total New York to AOL Digital City.

1995- Ressi founded a web development firm called Methodfive and later sold it to Xceed in 2000 for $88 million.

2002- Ressi used the capital from his previous two ventures to found Game Trust which is a developer of online casual game infrastructure. 

Game Trust had its first round of funding just a year later in 2003, securing investments Intel Capital and Silicon Valley Venture Partners. 

Game Trust was going to secure its second round of funding worth $10 million by Softbank Capital in 2005 but on the day of the deal representatives from Softbank Capital informed Adeo Ressi that they were pulling out.

At the time of the negotiations with Softbank Capital, Ressi was contractually obliged not to seek out other investors and when Softbank pulled out Game Trust was left with little remaining capital.

Which forced Ressi to take out a bridge loan from existing investors to keep Game Trust afloat.

But by the fall of 2005 Game Trust had already secured $9 million funding including $3 million from TWJ Capital. Later Elon Musk was voted of the board of directors after a failed development project at Game Trust and replaced with Thomas Jones, The son of TWJ Capital founder. 

Thomas Jones then proceeded to take the control of Game Trust away from Ressi but his attempt to pry away the company from Ressi was unsuccessful.

In 2007 Ressi eventually sold Game Trust to RealNetworks. 

2007- All his experiences with venture capitalist led him to start The Funded in 2007. The website is designed to allow entrepreneurs to anonymous reviews of venture capitals and their processes. 

The Funded was met with derision from venture capital groups but turned out to be popular among entrepreneurs.  

At first, Ressi intended to keep the website anonymous but the news about the site’s existence got leaked to TechCrunch. By March 2007 the website had 1,000 anonymous entrepreneur members.

In order to keep the anonymity, Ressi adopted the pseudonym of “Ted”.

But in November 2007 Ressi decided to reveal his identity in a piece in “Wired” .

And by January 2008 The Funded had 3,600 members.

2009- Adeo Ressi embarked on another venture called The Founder Institute, a start-up incubator and entrepreneur training program headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Ressi founded the organization his longtime colleague Jonathan Greechan. The goal of the organization is to combat start-up failure and globalize Silicon Valley. 

From 2009 to 2014 the institute had expanded to over 80 cities and 40 nations worldwide.

Ressi founded the institute to better understand the ingredients for a successful entrepreneur and also help the entrepreneurs create better businesses.

2011-   Ressi and the Founder Institute in collaboration with Orrick Law Firm released the Founder Advisor Standard Template (FAST Agreement), a simple legal framework that entrepreneurs can use freely to create relationships with business advisors. 

2012-  Ressi and the Founder Institute in collaboration with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich Rosai released Convertible Equity. Convertible Equity is a financing vehicle that provides all of the flexibility of convertible debt without hindering a company with loans. In addition, he was also interviewed by The New York Times as part of a cover story of the Sunday Business Section of the newspaper.

2014- Adeo Ressi co-founded a venture capital investment firm called Expansive Ventures with Jon Soberg, a venture capitalist

2015- Adeo Ressi was featured on the cover of Entrepreneur Magazine and also began writing as a Guest Contributor to Forbes Magazine.

2017- Ressi left the Expansive Venture after a dispute between the Co-Founders.

Adeo Ressi’s Views about selling companies

We know Ressi to be the man who sold two of his companies before he was even 30 and made billions off of the sale.

But when Alejandro Cremades invited Ressi on his Podcast and talked to him about his strategy of building and selling companies in answer to that speculation Ressi said 

 “Well, when I was younger I thought building and selling was a good idea. Now I don’t believe in selling as much. I think that if you want to build something, you should work on something that you don’t want to sell, and in fact, that may lead to you getting offers to sell and I think if you get offers to sell or you have inklings to sell, if you feel that you’re doing the right thing, you probably shouldn’t sell. So a hundred percent of every company that you sell will die. It will die in one form or another and there’s some examples that I’ve seen of companies that have sold and survived for extended periods of time and even improved but they eventually also die.

So for example, I sold a company—I sold two companies for what amounted to be approximately a billion dollars when I was younger under the age of 30 and one of them survived for quite some time in excess of 10 years but eventually it was, it died. And so that’s quite a long run but you know the second you sell something to someone else and I bought a lot of companies too so I’ve been on 25 transactions either on the buy side or sell side. And you know the ensuing entity just eventually goes away. The thing that purchases you may go away. The thing that you sold to them will definitely go away. So if you want to build something that’s your legacy, you want to build something meaningful, these days I don’t think of selling as an option”.