Selling RYGO: what an exit actually feels like
I wasn't trying to sell. Then someone approached me — and I learned that an exit is more rewarding, and far stranger, than anyone tells you.
RYGO was the first company I sold, and it was one of the most amazing things I’ve done — and, in ways I didn’t see coming, one of the strangest. I’d been on autopilot for years by then: building Find My Bus, rebranding it into RYGO, and never really stopping. Any founder knows the feeling. When you’re building something you’re in a tunnel, and nothing is going to stop you delivering, so you don’t look outside it for a very long time.
It was hugely rewarding, of course. Every hard year was in service of one idea — using technology to make public transport better for everyone. But a business also exists to turn a profit, and to build something a buyer actually wants is its own kind of validation.
The strange part is that I wasn’t trying to sell at all. It was Eamonn Hughes who approached me for a meeting, and RYGO ended up merging into uTrack’s suite of products. I hadn’t gone looking for an exit — it came looking for me.
I don’t regret saying yes. Running RYGO came with real stresses, and I had a lot of customers depending on it. I needed the support of people who had been there and done this before, and were good at it. Handing it to a team like that was the right call.
But the world kind of stopped for me all the same. I kept working on RYGO, integrating it into uTrack after the deal, and yet it wasn’t my baby anymore. There’s something genuinely disorienting about that. Once you’re no longer the majority shareholder, the fire that got you out of bed changes — at least it did for me.
So: no regrets, but far more adjustment than I expected. Selling your company isn’t the clean, uncomplicated win you picture. It brings amazing change, but it’s still change, and it took me a long time to get used to not owning the thing I’d built. Nobody warns you about that part. Now I know.