Today we announced that my startup,auctomatic, has been acquired by Live Current Media. This marks a huge landmark for Kul, Patrick and myself - we’re obviously massively excited and happy that we can finally announce this (we’ve been in negotiations for almost six months now). Kul has done (as usual) a fantastic job of describing the story with his bbc piece. I plan on blogging more in the coming weeks about why we sold and what we learnt through the process but for now I wanted to make sure that all the people who helped us along the way aren’t forgotten (and trying my hardest not to make it sound like we won an oscar rather than got acquired). Turns out this is a much longer list than I’d initially thought.

The Team The most import thanks goes to the team I’ve been lucky enough to work with. Thanks Kul, Patrick, Phil, Brian and John for some good times.

Investors Of course we couldn’t have gotten anywhere without our investors:

• Our UK angels who first believed in us: Michael Lewis, Patel Family and Harry Clarke
• Y Combinator for taking a punt on two non-hackers and introducing us to Patrick.
• Paul Graham for his candid advice and Jessica Livingston for the countless introductions and help along the way (special note: without Jessica’s help, Kul and I would not have our US visas).
• Paul Buchheit for first beating down our idea each week at YC dinners and then giving us money
• Chris Sacca for teaching us to grow some balls

Advisors We’ve been incredibly lucky to have been advised by some very smart people:

• Judith Clegg - when we were back in the UK Judith did more than anyone to help us with our first fundraising for boso. We owe her massively.
• Naval Ravikant - has the most information conveyed per spoken word of anyone I know. His advice always turned out to be (sometimes frustratingly) correct.
• Evan Williams - gave us two desks in the Twitter offices during our YC program. Pretty much the best welcome to the Valley present possible. He’s also always been an immense source of help and advice all along.
• Allen Morgan - though we didn’t raise a Series A, Allen was always a great source of help and advice
• Katherine Barr - recommended reading “Getting to Yes”, a fantastic book that helped immensely

Peers We’ve also been lucky to have an amazing peer group, especially all the YC guys, some special mentions:

• Robby from Zenter for letting us crash at his place while we were homeless
• Tsumobi’s for hosting us while we were in Boston
• The Zenopy crew for being an incredible source of support and help from the early days
• The Songkicks and other founders who came along to help us pitch at eBay Live
• Srini from YouOS and Project Wedding for being our first hacking tutor (and his dog Amber)
• Bob Goodson and Kirill Makharinsky from Younoodle for showing us the way to Silicon Valley

Everyone else

• Wilson Sonsini, in particular Carolynn Levy, for being our legal counsel from the beginning and doing a great job
• Chris Wright for preparing our all important US visa petitions
• Groovytrain for giving us office space when we were young and still working on boso in London
• All investors we spoke to but didnt close, your advice helped us nontheless - in particular thanks to Mike Maples, Mark Pincus and Rajeev Motwani
• Everyone who signed one of our visa reference letters who’s not already been mentioned - Mitch Kapor, Max Levchin, Chris Anderson and Biz Stone
• Ankur Pansari for his time and insigh as a powerseller
• Thanks to everyone who interned with us, especially Hiroki for coming out to San Francisco, but also all the old boso interns - Keren, Jean, Clarissa and crew
• Friends and family who have supported us along the way

Apologies if I’ve missed anyone, thank you all!

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