Wistia Turned Down the Exit. Then It Had to Prove the Business Was Worth Keeping.

In 2017, Chris Savage and his co-founder had an offer on the table to sell Wistia for enough money that neither of them would ever need to work again. They said no, and instead borrowed 17 million dollars to buy the company back from itself, paying early investors and employees roughly what the acquirers had offered, without giving up the business.

Chris told this story at BoS USA 2025, alongside Chris Lavigne, Wistia’s head of production and a 14-year employee, in a fireside conversation about what actually happened after they turned the deal down. The headline decision is the memorable part. Proving it was the right call took the next five years.

Why founders say no to the pot of gold

Three companies approached Wistia about buying the business in 2017. Chris and his co-founder, who’d always turned those conversations down before, said yes this time and got deep enough in to land a real offer. While making a list of everything they’d do after selling, they realized the list was just Wistia again, the same people, the same problems, rebuilt from scratch. That was the moment they admitted to each other they were actually unhappy with how they were running the business:

• chasing growth at all costs
• saying yes to ideas without ever asking what to stop doing
• accumulating what Chris calls zombie projects that stayed alive because nobody asked if they should.

Raising to serve growth, not to search for it

Turning down the offer left an open question: what to do about the roughly 1.4 million dollars already raised from angel investors, and the liquidity everyone had been promised someday? The answer was the 17 million dollar debt round, structured so early investors and employees could choose to take cash now rather than wait for an exit that wasn’t coming. Chris’s framing for founders weighing a raise: are you raising to search for growth you don’t have yet, or to serve growth you already know how to produce. Pre-product-market-fit, you may need outside capital and want the smallest raise you can get away with, since that dilution is the most expensive you’ll ever take. Already know what works? Wistia funded a chunk of its own growth just by switching the default payment plan from monthly to annual, and the debt round was the more dramatic version of the same idea: borrowing against a business they understood, rather than diluting further or selling outright.

Independence didn’t automatically buy speed

The buyback bought Wistia the right to set its own terms. It didn’t automatically buy a fast product org. By 2021, flush with profit and conviction, Wistia doubled its product and engineering headcount from 50 to 100 people in a single year, fully self-funded. Shipping got slower. By October 2022, Chris stopped assuming the fix was more people and asked a harder question: what if the bottleneck was his own review process, where every roadmap ran through him first and the best-organized deck won, not the one that shipped the most customer value.

The fix was structural: all 13 product teams got full ownership of their own roadmaps, judged on a single measure, shipping real customer value every two weeks. A tagging feature scoped at six months under the old process shipped in two weeks under the new one. Product releases went from 12 a year to 70, then 130, with no change in team size.

The through-line across both moments: the buyback bought Wistia the right to set its own terms. Making that worth anything meant being honest, twice, about where the business was actually stuck, and changing the structure rather than pushing harder inside the old one.

Watch the full talk, including the equity program, the hiring pendulum, and the Q&A on OKRs and product structure.