Thomas Smale — Tech Exits & Growth | CEO @ FE International | CCO @ ThriveCart | 75,000 Founders Helped
Tech Exits & Growth | CEO @ FE International | CCO @ ThriveCart | 75,000 Founders Helped
Thomas Smale ranks #403 of 19,190 LinkedIn creators in Financial Services, and is a standout voice in United States. They have 17.9K followers and published 29 posts in the last 30 days at a 0.4% average engagement rate.
- 17.9K followers
- 29 posts / 30d
- 0.4% avg engagement
- 307 follower growth / 30d
The roast
Thomas claims he’s helped 75,000 founders, yet his engagement rate is so low that even his own algorithm assumes he’s a bot. He spends his days facilitating exits for digital businesses because he’s terrified of anyone actually staying to see how little he does.
About Thomas
I founded FE International in 2010 and have spent the past 15 years building it into one of the most active M&A advisors in the digital business space — 1,500+ transactions closed, $50 billion+ in total deal value across SaaS, AI, eCommerce, and digital media. The business works because we understand how buyers think. Most founders overestimate timeline and underestimate preparation — we close deals faster and at better multiples because we've seen every version of this process play out. Day to day, I serve as CCO at ThriveCart, a leading checkout and commerce platform used by over 75,000 businesses globally, supporting over $8Bn in transactions. Much of my focus is on our core commercial and marketing partners.
Highlights
- Consistent Creator — 19 posts in 30d · top 5%
- Big Audience — 17,935 followers · top 10%
- Top 10% in Financial Services — Ranked #41 of 547 creators
- Top 10% in United States — Ranked #523 of 5940 creators
Recent posts
$550 million. And Marc Lore called it mourning. "We didn't even want to go out for a drink. It wasn't a celebration. It was sort of like mourning." That was the Diapers.com sale to Amazon in 2010. Half a billion dollars. And the man felt like he'd lost something. → Lore lost control of Quidsi inside Amazon → By 2017, Amazon shut down Diapers.com entirely → The thing he built, gone His takeaway wasn't about the price. It was about what he gave up when he signed. So he built Jet.com. Sold it to Walmart for $3.3 billion in 2016. Six times larger. But this time he negotiated to become p
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Four Italian college friends just IPO'd at $18.4 billion. By buying apps everyone else gave up on. Bending Spoons listed on Nasdaq at $29/share. Shares popped 31% on day one. The cofounders are now collectively worth $8.9 billion. Their playbook: → Acquire 50+ stalled products → Gut the team → Rebuild the tech → Raise prices The portfolio reads like a time capsule of the internet: AOL. Evernote. Vimeo. Eventbrite. WeTransfer. They bought AOL for $1.45 billion. It now generates half of their $1.3 billion in annual revenue. Evernote: → Acquired for $200 million → Prices raised from $100
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$90 million exit. Then Doug Winter emptied his personal bank account and started over from zero. He bootstrapped his next company for 3.5 years with no outside capital. It hit a billion-dollar valuation. Here's the story. → Winter founded Objectiva Software Solutions, which was acquired by Document Sciences in 2004. → Document Sciences later sold to EMC for around $90 million. → Winter became GM of the group at EMC, learned how enterprise software scales from the inside, then walked away to build something new. In 2010, he and four co-founders launched Seismic, a sales enablement platfo
12 reactions · 4 comments · 0 reposts