Ingrid Alongi
Quick Left
Co-founded Quick Left in Boulder in 2010 to offer website and mobile development services after getting laid off from her software engineering job a year earlier at Gnip, which is now owned by Twitter. While pregnant with twins and facing a shifting business market, Alongi decided to sell the company in 2016 to Cognizant, a massive consulting firm that employs more than 250,000. She now serves as senior director for the mentor network of Cognizant Accelerator, a startup within the larger company.
On deciding to sell
“For me, my life situation was changing. I was about to have twins. There were also challenges in the market that I felt I wasn’t up to. You always want to sell before you’re in trouble. There was also a shift in the market and my own
feelings of wanting to get out. I was starting to get a little burned out.”
A shift in the market?
“I’m still seeing companies suffer from it. But our prices were dropping and developer salaries were increasing. We would have to figure out how to solve that with either outsourcing or any number of things. We were starting to see a pattern of customers wanting to pick and choose who they wanted to work with and (pick) the senior people for their team but not pay full rates. The same year we got acquired, a few other shops closed, like Thoughtbot closed its Denver office, Modeset closed.”
On timing
“Anytime you’re thinking of being acquired, you want to think of a few different things: Where would I want to go, where would my team want to go? Those are some of the discussions we had. I basically put it out to my personal and professional network that we were looking to sell and that’s how we got introduced to Cognizant. … If you’re looking to do this, you want to start nine months ahead of time. I takes six to nine months. I did a lot of talking while I was on maternity leave. And when I came back from maternity leave, everything had been finished and wrapped up. I came back to a new company. But it was kind of good, too. I had the chance to go through the mourning process, I suppose, in the privacy of my own home with something nice to focus on, my twins. When I came back to the office, I had a great attitude.”
On finding the right buyer
“(Cognizant) was not my first choice in companies to be acquired. I was cautiously optimistic based on the interactions I had. But the last company I expected to sell to was a giant company. The takeaway is to have an open mind as to what the potential can be. There was a company that had a better fit with us, they did things like us, had a culture just like ours. But the deal was so bad. There’s a tension you have as a founder. You do your best for your team, for yourself. But there’s a lot of things pulling you and sometimes you don’t have a lot of choices, like sometimes, there’s not a buyer. We were lucky.”
Advice to startups
“The startup community romanticizes acquisitions and exits. A lot of them are not that glamorous. Keep that in mind. Mine wasn’t that glamorous because I was a services company.”
What’s next?
“We get to do the cool startup stuff we always wanted to do before the acquisition but we couldn’t because of budgets. We’d have to take clients we didn’t really want because we had to meet payroll. I get to hire people because we need them on the team and I don’t have to worry that ‘Oh, I have to close another deal before we can hire.’ I just got through hiring 20 people in one shot.”