Boomerang chief executives keep coming in swinging. Coined as the label for executives returning to companies they departed or were removed from, the cohort of prominent tech and media comebacks recently grew with Bob Iger and Sam Altman.
On Feb. 23, the founder of local female-founder media company Create & Cultivate announced she had bought back the company three years after cashing in $22 million for her majority stake.
Jaclyn Johnson struck a deal with her company’s former buyer, the Brentwood-based private equity firm Corridor Capital, and brought on a new chief executive to take back majority ownership at a slashed $8 million valuation, according to a Forbes estimate.
Her new business partner, Marina Middleton, now owns an equal stake in the startup. After packing up the office space financed by Corridor, Create & Cultivate’s new leadership believes they can more than make up for lost value.
“Our ambitions are big; we want to build this into a $1 billion brand,” Johnson said.
The former media company
In 2020, Chinatown-based Create & Cultivate was riding high, and Johnson was well poised to sell the company.
Create & Cultivate grew to become a multihyphenate media and events hub for women entrepreneurs, and generated $5 million in the first quarter of that year through sponsorships and participant sales.
Set up at the downtown Rolling Greens event center, its “LA 2020” conference saw celebrity business owners like Jessica Simpson and Eva Mendes grace a Mastercard-sponsored stage, while brand activations ranging from LaCroix to Facebook Messenger filled attendees’ tchotchke bags.
It was all imagined out of a two-story, 5,000-square-foot office space in Chinatown, where millennial-pink hues and exposed wood beams earned a feature in Dwell Magazine.
For a company built for, well, brand building, Create & Cultivate itself amassed a substantial following.
“It was gangbusters success,” Johnson said. “We were the largest media company…
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