The spreadsheet had forty-seven line items. Each one was a thing that could go wrong with the acquisition. Regulatory risk, technical debt, contract transferability, data protection obligations, undisclosed liabilities. Forty-seven ways to lose money.
I was fourteen. Sitting in my room in Istanbul, laptop on my desk, a half-finished glass of tea getting cold beside it. On the screen, next to the spreadsheet, a company's entire financial history laid out in PDFs. Revenue, costs, bank statements, outstanding invoices.
This was due diligence. And it was, without question, the most grown-up thing I had ever done.
By 2022, I had been building software for two years. HMD Developments was an established operation with a team and a growing list of products. What we did not have was our own payment infrastructure.
Every project that touched transactions meant integrating someone else's API, accepting someone else's fee structure, working around someone else's limitations. The calculation was simple: keep paying rent on someone else's infrastructure, or buy your own.
The opportunity appeared through a connection. A payment processing platform, small but functional, was available. It handled cryptocurrency transactions, IBAN transfers, and card payments. The infrastructure existed. The compliance work was done. It had users.
The acquisition made enough strategic sense that it accelerated everything else. Buying the payment platform led directly to incorporating HMD Corporation as a holding company, creating a proper structure to house both HMD Developments and the newly acquired payments business.
Due diligence on a payment platform is not like reviewing a web application. Payment companies sit inside a web of regulatory requirements that differs by jurisdiction. KYC. Anti-money laundering. PCI DSS if cards are involved. Each of those three acronyms represents a mountain of ongoing compliance work.
We reviewed the codebase. It was, genuinely, better than I expected. Clean API. Sensible database schema. The kind of code that suggests the people who wrote it cared about the next person who would read it. That mattered. Acquiring a company with a messy codebase is like buying a house with hidden water damage. Everything looks fine until it does not.
The financials were modest. Small revenue, small costs, small user base. But the users who were there kept coming back, and retention in payment processing is a strong signal. Payment infrastructure is painful to switch. Once someone builds their workflow around your API, they do not leave for marginal improvements elsewhere.
There were forty-seven things on that risk spreadsheet. We mitigated or accepted every one of them. The acquisition closed.
Then the real work started.
Integrating a separate company into an existing structure is entirely unlike building something new. When you build, you decide everything. When you acquire, you inherit decisions that someone else made, and you have to live with most of them while carefully unwinding the rest.
The platform became HMD Pay, operating under HMD Corporation's finance division. Its first job was connecting to our central authentication, so that users across all properties could log in with one identity. Second was standardising the API so HMD Developments' products could call it cleanly. Third was wiring up monitoring so that payment health showed up in our existing dashboards.
Three phases. About three months total. Not because any single phase was technically hard, but because payment infrastructure is the one place where "move fast and break things" will literally break things. Money was flowing through those systems. Rushing was not an option.
The strangest part of the whole experience was how normal it felt in the moment. The spreadsheets, the code review, the integration planning. It was work. Detailed, careful, often boring work. The fact that the person doing it was fourteen felt relevant only when I stepped back and looked at the situation from the outside.
People ask what I learned from the acquisition. The honest answer is that a single experience taught me more about business than the two years of building software that came before it. Not because any individual lesson was profound, but because acquiring a company forces you to understand a business as a whole. Not just the product. The legal structure, the financial obligations, the compliance requirements, the team dynamics, the customer relationships. All of it. At once.
If you are ever thinking about building payment infrastructure from scratch, consider whether you should. Find one that already exists, satisfy yourself that it was built properly, and buy it. The original team already made thousands of mistakes so you do not have to.
The tea was cold by the time the deal closed, metaphorically and literally. But the infrastructure is still running. Years later, it processes real transactions every day. Zero fees.
That last part deserves its own post.