Chalkboard calls it quits after going to Silicon Valley

This was jointly written by Terence Lee and Gwendolyn Regina Tan.

It was a simple party with a few invited guests, some pizza and drinks, a seemingly ordinary networking event at the Chalkboard office in Mount Sophia. No formal announcement was made, but some of the folks knew something was up.

There would be no happy ending for Chalkboard, a Singapore-based mobile advertising startup. The co-founders, Saumil Nanavati and Bernard Leong, decided months earlier to close shop. They were just quietly figuring out a way to do it.

Interestingly, they were very close to getting acquired. Chalkboard was, after all, a pretty attractive target: Sales were coming in, and they were close to breaking even. One interested party was a major firm from Silicon Valley, the other a prominent Singapore company. However, they felt neither acquisition was the right fit.

But despite the setback, neither entrepreneur took it as a personal failure. It had been a team effort all the way. The party was simply a celebration of the journey they’ve taken together with friends.

“We were disappointed it didn’t go the way we wanted, but we were not ashamed, we did the best we could with the smartest people, including the investors who gave their best. We tried,” says Saumil in an interview with SGE (note: SGE is now part of Tech in Asia) on Thursday afternoon.

He and Bernard even came up with an acronym to describe the totality of their experience: MIA (Market, Investors, and Ambition).

Their ambitions for Chalkboard were big enough to match the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Their investor, Joi Ito from Singapore’s Neoteny Labs, bought into their vision.

What ultimately caused them to fold was a confluence of factors: The incompatibility between their business model and the Asian market, a weak US venture capital climate after the European Crisis, and the acquisition offers which they felt did their stakeholders (and themselves) injustice.

Here’s the rest of the interview with Saumil (edited for brevity and clarity):

SGE: Did you try to court acquirers and what’s the process?

My February trip was to do that. We had a few from the US, Singapore, and Malaysia, they’re distinct group of companies. One was an acq-hire.

The challenge we faced was in one situation the investors lose and we win and get employed, but then investors doesn’t get value. Or, investors get a payout and we get into an unfavorable position. These were stark choices we were facing.