242: A Merger & Acquisition Expert shares… How to Create a Successful Exit Path | Touraj Parang of Serve Robotics

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Background on Touraj Parang of Serve Robotics:

Touraj Parang is the President & COO of Serve Robotics. He is a veteran Silicon Valley dealmaker, a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, advisor, and M&A expert who has sat in almost every seat around the table structuring and negotiating strategic transactions since the late 1990’s, including as a corporate attorney at legal powerhouses WSGR and O’Melveny & Myers. He earned his JD from Yale Law School and his AB in Philosophy and Economics from Stanford University.

He has been a founder, executive, and trusted advisor to several fast-growing technology startups with exits to LinkedIn, Instacart, Vistaprint, Postmates, and Amplify among others. He has also spent nearly a decade on the acquirer side of M&A deals as a corporate development executive at Webs and GoDaddy. Exit Path draws on Touraj’s decades-long unique experience involving hundreds of M&A transactions, strategic partnerships, and venture capital investments totaling billions of dollars in aggregate value. He is currently the President and Chief Operating Officer at Serve Robotics, which he helped spin out of Uber, and an Operating Advisor at Pear VC, an early-stage venture capital firm, where he enjoys collaborating with and providing strategic guidance to mission-driven entrepreneurs.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

  • [1:02] Touraj Parang, 49 years old from California, has been a tech entrepreneur since the late 90s. His company, Serve Robotics, is an autonomous sidewalk robotics startup, which he describes as a Tesla on a sidewalk that can do a lot of things.
  • [2:08] They produce autonomous shopping cart sized robots that are designed for urban environments.
  • [5:34] The role of Touraj in Serve Robotics is the COO or Chief Operating Officer. When he started out in Silicon Valley, he was a corporate lawyer.
  • [6:46] Touraj shares the story of how Serve Robotics started.
  • [8:27] Even though he works full-time on Serve Robotics, Touraj is very passionate in supporting new entrepreneurs in Pear VC.
  • [10:17] It took him 5 years to finish his book – Exit Path: How to Win the Startup End Game.
  • [14:45] Touraj offers some advice on time management.
  • [16:50] Coming from an immigrant family, Touraj came to the US to study hard and get into a good university. He studied Philosophy and Economics in Stanford and then got accepted into Yale law school.
  • [20:52] Realizing he had the passion for entrepreneurship, Touraj was able to successfully grow Jaxtr, his first company, to 10 million users and won several awards.
  • [25:36] Touraj talks about how he got into his first venture capital stint.
  • [29:37] As a lawyer, Touraj wasn’t happy with his job because he believed that he wasn’t building anything and he wasn’t creating anything of value.
  • [32:56] In 2004, Touraj had this idea to merge the phone and the online social identity without getting charged by phone companies. This idea became his first company, Jaxtr.
  • [40:58] Jaxtr operated for 4 years and they were able to raise about $20 million and grew to 70 employees. Touraj sold the company for almost nothing.
  • [47:37] Having an exit strategy is a very important lesson that Touraj learned from his experience with Jaxtr.
  • [52:48] Touraj continues to talk about what they could have done differently during their time with Jaxtr.
  • [55:37] After Jaxtr, Touraj joined Webs, which was an online small business creation platform. They were acquired by Vistaprint at a very good price.
  • [59:00] When Webs was acquired, Touraj continued to invest in startups and he founded UpCounsel, which is a legal marketplace platform. He eventually left UpCounsel and joined GoDaddy because he wanted to be a part of a large organization.
  • [1:03:17] For Touraj, the biggest mistake that an entrepreneur can make is to delay their exit strategy until later in the game.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

  1. 📖📚 Favorite Books? The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, Give & Take by Adam Grant, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  2. 🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Handheld Milk Foamer
  3. 🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Google Calendar – If you don't schedule it, it doesn't exist
  4. 💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Supply chain constraints for parts to build our robots

Key Point from the Interview:

  • “We have so much fire drills as entrepreneur on a daily basis that we tend to lose sight of some of the more strategic long-term things but at the end of the day actually, those end up being what makes all the difference in our business. We still have to put out the day-to-day fires but if we are not deliberate and strategic about where we are heading, we may lose the business altogether.”

Resources Mentioned:

 

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