COO Stuart Last on Audioboom's future
· First published · By 
This article is at least a year old
The Triton [Digital] acquisition was given every chance to succeed, but the markets and investor community just did not agree with the valuation or see that value in their business model. Everyone at Audioboom is happy to take the company forward independently though – our progress in 2017 was tremendous, and now we can continue that work without interference.
Many parts of the transaction were not ideal, including the £700k break-clause. However, I wanted to make clear that only £90k of this is in cash with the remainder in stock.
It has been a massive distraction and one result has been that with some of our publishing partners we have fallen behind on our payment schedule. Many are fully up-to-date, some are a couple of weeks behind, and a few have payments owing well beyond our usual terms.
It’s not good enough, we should not have let the distraction of the Triton deal impact the work of our partners. But we are working hard to get back to where we should be – we made a round of payments yesterday and today. It’s going to take a few weeks to get everything back on schedule, but now at least we can focus on our core business again.
The future is good. Even during the past couple of months of navigating this deal we have made Audioboom stronger. We have launched four new Audioboom Originals, we signed the SBI Audio podcast network to the platform, we have launched a production deal with A&E Networks, and our subscription model is growing 50% every quarter.
Our CEO and brokers are already into the fundraise. We need to get that done, get our publishers up to date, and keep building the company.
— Stuart Last, COO of Audioboom
