How To Beat Seller's Remorse

They realized they'd made a mistake. Then these entrepreneurs buckled down and bought their businesses back

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September 3, 2007 at 4:00 AM UTC

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Thomas Karren founded Win-gateWeb in 1998, thinking it would be a side venture for vacation money. But to his delight, the Lindon (Utah) maker of Web-based event-planning software landed a big contract almost immediately, and he and his two co-founders quit their day jobs. By 2004 they'd taken the venture as far as they could on their own, so they sold it to MediaLive International, an established player in the event industry. The founders agreed to work for MediaLive in a so-called earn-out, in which an entrepreneur

is paid for his company over a few years and gets full payment only if it does well as a unit within the larger one. Still, Karren prepared to retire at 37. "We thought we'd set something up that would take care of us," he recalls.