“Founders and shareholders should be careful when considering a sale of a majority of their business as they may no longer be the sole decision makers, and their roles may change after the transaction.”
-Shruti Gurudanti, Rose Law Group partner and director of corporate transactions
By Allie Garfinkle | Yahoo! Finance
For Scott Trench, this all started with a park bench, someone else’s dog, and a stranger.
Trench, in his first couple years out of college, was trying to figure out what to do with his life. And one late morning more than a decade ago, he found his answer: Out walking his friend’s dog, Trench sat down next to someone he’d never met and, after the two spoke about investing, the stranger invited the 20-something to a weekly, peer-to-peer Real Estate Mastermind Group. Trench accepted the invitation and shortly thereafter met Josh Dorkin, founder of the then-new real estate education platform BiggerPockets. Trench was already a fan.
“I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re Josh Dorkin and I love the BiggerPockets podcast,'” said Trench. “Now, I think he remembers it differently, but I think he said ‘go away kid’ three or four times. So, I kept following up.”
Trench would become BiggerPockets employee number three. Today, the company has more than 90 employees—and Trench is now the company’s CEO. Dorkin stepped back from BiggerPockets in 2018, but since then the company has continued to grow: BiggerPockets has podcasts, digital tools, events, and bootcamps. The company now has more than three million members and The Chernin Group (TCG) has made a majority investment in the platform, Fortune can exclusively report. TCG now owns more than 50% of the company’s shares, though the firm declined to provide further specifics. BiggerPockets is also launching new tools, like Market Finder and Deal Finder, in conjunction with the news.
