Some founders rely on brokers when selling their businesses. Others search for a suitable buyer or field acquisition offers out of the blue.

And sometimes, an offer to buy a business comes from somewhere much closer to home.

Connie Loizos built her venture capital-focused content and events business, StrictlyVC, while also serving as TechCrunch’s Silicon Valley editor. In August 2023, her employer bought her side hustle for an undisclosed sum.

How StrictlyVC grew into an acquisition target

A veteran tech reporter, Loizos founded StrictlyVC in 2013 after a five-year stint as a senior editor at Thomson Reuters. The project began as a daily newsletter focused on the venture capital business and later expanded to include a podcast and events featuring top names in the space such as Sam Altman and Marc Andreessen.

She operated as a solo entrepreneur, eventually reaching 60,000 free newsletter subscribers and becoming profitable through sponsorships, according to Axios. No revenue numbers were available.

While continuing to build her business, Loizos joined TechCrunch as Silicon Valley editor to lead their coverage of the Bay Area tech scene in 2015.

As StrictlyVC grew, TechCrunch was undergoing changes of its own. In 2021, Verizon, which owned TechCrunch, sold it, AOL, and Yahoo to the private equity firm Apollo Global Management.

The newly created entity was named Yahoo, and its new owners were determined to invest in the business, including through acquisitions. They found a tempting target in StrictlyVC and didn’t need to go far to locate the founder and open negotiations.

Terms of the deal have not been released, but StrictlyVC will continue to operate as a sub-brand of TechCrunch and will “lean into what we do best, which is aggressively cover the world of startups and venture capital,” Loizos told Axios. StrictlyVC also plans to add more content and events, particularly in areas outside San Francisco.

Loizos will become general manager and editor-in-chief of TechCrunch. In her new role, she aims to leverage her experience at StrictlyVC to deepen TechCrunch’s industry reporting.

“Merging StrictlyVC’s unique, insider perspective with TechCrunch means we’ll be drilling down even further into the founder stories that originally put TechCrunch on the map – and that have kept TechCrunch at the center of the conversation ever since,” Loizos said in a statement.

Loizos did not respond to requests for comment.