I'm obviously doing something wrong with this energy and high-tech approach.
From Inc., September 10:
Founder Daniel Rotman raised little money, hired cautiously, and built around a practical product instead of growth-at-all-costs. The result was a $1.4 billion acquisition by Mars....
....VIDEO
Inc. had the story back in June:
Cat Fancy: How Daniel Rotman’s PrettyLitter Turned $1 Million in Capital Into a $1.4 Billion Exit
The innovative cat litter business may have been unsexy, but it was wildly lucrative when it sold to Mars. Now Rotman and his investors are ready to tell the whole scoop.
During the 2010s, buzzy direct-to-consumer brands were snatching up tens of millions in venture capital, but first-time founder Daniel Rotman raised barely any for his cat litter brand, PrettyLitter. Even as the company’s sales surpassed $100 million, he hired just a dozen full-time employees. In 2021, the scrappy team scaled the company to what would ultimately be a $1.4 billion acquisition by Mars. Five years after exiting, Rotman has left his formal role as an adviser at the multinational manufacturer and is returning to his first career: politics.
Now, he is sharing the playbook that got him to a nine-figure exit. His first piece of advice? “Go unsexy. Go for those categories that are ripe for disruption that really need someone smart representing the needs of the consumer,” says Rotman. “While everyone’s looking at dog…No one was looking at cat, so the whole time I was eating everybody’s lunch.” Suddenly, he says, all of the incumbents and investors had the same reaction: “Where the hell did these people come from?”...
