Why I sold my startup

On September 1st, Carousell’s acquihire of the Watch Over Me team became public knowledge, and so did the decision to sunset our personal safety app Watch Over Me, and open source the technology we’ve built.

Since then I’ve gotten a bunch of questions about the exit.

There have been a few questions but a general one that has been hovering about has been “Why an acquihire?” followed by “Why an exit to Carousell? That doesn’t seem very sexy.”

In order to answer that question I’m going to have to take us back to 31st December 2015.

I was fresh off my the celebration of my 28th birthday in Koh Samui, lying in a shack by the beach with two of my closest friends. In the past couple of years, I’ve made it a habit to take vacations out of the country with people I love from my birthday throughout the New Year for some Reflection and Relaxation. So as I straddled the precipice of 2015, and looked forward into 2016, I asked myself a question I ask myself every year:

Are you doing what you’re meant to be doing on this earth right now? And if you aren’t, is what you’re doing now going to help you get there?

Every year, I get a different flavor of answers — often there’s a little doubt. Sometimes a “yes” with absolute certainty. Sometimes a “wait and see”.

That day, the answer was a clear no.

No, I most certainly was not doing what I was meant to be doing on this earth.

As most of you already know, Watch Over Me was launched right after a major traumatic event in my life — an event that made safety a huge priority.

I decided to work on it with my cofounder James because there was so much anger, so much pain in me, just so much negative energy that needed to be channeled somewhere. I chose to work on it because I needed to not feel stuck. I needed to feel like I was doing something with all this, and that something beautiful can come from tragedy.

And something beautiful did emerge. Truth be told, it’s been such an incredible, if at times crazy ride.

How do you put a price on safety?