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We realized that we would have to adjust prices. So we sat down and talked about it and, literally in a day, made the decision to completely restructure our product line and roll that out pretty quickly. That s the kind of thing that would have been difficult to do in a more complex, let s say, structure.

Livingston: You could be more flexible and move faster. Gruner: Yes. So we were able to compete with all these startups almost all of

which went out of business or were acquired. We acquired two, for literally a penny on the dollar. We acquired one firm that had well over $20 million of venture capital invested for a few hundred thousand dollars. They just blew up. Many of these guys got in the business not understanding shareholder communications. Most importantly, not understanding it s very much a people kind of business and that investor relations officers are typically people kind of people. Their job is to communicate. So coming in and selling technology particularly technology as an unknown was a very hard sell. They had a hard time breaking into the market, whereas we had worked a company at a time. We had had consultants early on that educated us, brought us in to companies, gave us credibility kind of put their name on the line after they got to know us well. CCBN did well because they were backed by Thomson Financial. Their key founder, Jeff Parker, had great visibility in that community, and credibility. But everybody else disappeared.

Livingston: Did you get acquisition offers Gruner: We had a number. At one point we had an acquisition offer by a dot-

com whose stock price had gone up by a factor of seven in the prior 3 months. They gave us an offer at the time that was valued in the tens of millions of dollars. This was a point where we had revenues of about $3 million. It was denominated in stock. We thought very seriously about it, but basically got cold feet because at that point we had been doing it for 7 years. We just felt, if the stock collapses, we ve lost it all. Nine months later, that stock was worth $205 million! So if we had done the deal, had I been smart enough to negotiate the deal where we could have gotten out of the stock, it would have been a $200,000,000 kind of deal. We had other deals that were a lot less, but we never saw anything that was the right fit, the right kind of liquidity, and the right kind of chemistry. We didn t want to sell the company to somebody that was going to disembowel it. So that s why, when we had an offer from NASDAQ and we had a couple of offers from them; I can t talk too specifically about it we felt that it was the right strategy. We ve known the people for a long time; we ve had marketing relationships with them; they re going into corporate services and they re very sincere about that. They want to use Shareholder.com as the foundation for building their corporate services. They re keeping the name. The valuation was right. It all happened very quickly.

Livingston: The stars were aligned. Gruner: Yeah, they were all aligned. Somebody told me a long time ago that generally companies are bought, not sold. And that s what we did. We didn t hire an investment bank or anything like that to go off and sell us. We just waited for the right opportunity. Livingston: Is there anything you might have done differently with