Acquired Speaker Deck from GitHub

We originally created Speaker Deck at Ordered List, Inc. Ordered List, including Speaker Deck, was acquired by GitHub in December 2011. There were a few pushes at GitHub to turn Speaker Deck into something more, but for various reasons they failed. Speaker Deck chugged on, but mostly in maintenance mode.

At some point in 2017, I (an employee still at the time) offered to buy Speaker Deck back. As the original creator, GitHub knew that I would take good care of it, which reduced their need to vet the buyer. Additionally, I was the only internal maintainer of Speaker Deck, so I had the most knowledge of what was necessary to keep it running. I was already doing most of that maintenance on the side, so it just made sense.

It took over a year to complete the transaction mostly because it was low priority for GitHub, but a few days before the Microsoft deal went down they were suddenly ready to close. I started a company, Fewer & Faster, with a few friends to help and we've been running the app ever since.