Exit.
The end of your involvement is part of the business you are building.
An exit is not one event or one number. It is a set of choices about ownership, timing, liquidity, control, the buyer, the people who stay, and what happens after the transaction. This chapter helps founders understand acquisition, merger, secondary sale, public-market routes, and orderly wind-downs without treating any one path as the definition of success.
What would a serious buyer need to understand before buying this company?
Explore the problem →What kind of exit could make sense for the company I am building?
Explore the problem →What happens to me, the team, and the company after an exit?
Explore the problem →The pieces to read first.
Practical material for doing the work.
Founder Exit Readiness: Can the Business Run Without You?
Founder dependency shows up when approvals, customer relationships and operating knowledge live mainly in one person.
What Should a Founder Clarify Before Accepting an Earnout or Post-Sale Role?
Clarify what the founder must deliver, how performance is measured, who controls the relevant decisions, what happens when circumstances change, and how the founder's post-sale role ends.
How Should Founders Compare a Full Sale and Partial Liquidity Option?
Compare ownership transferred, cash received, retained upside, control, risk, tax and post-closing obligations. Partial liquidity and a full sale solve different founder problems.
What Financial Records Should a Startup Have Ready for Buyer Due Diligence?
Prepare buyer-ready records before a transaction.
Thinking structures for the decisions ahead.
What other builders actually experienced.
Myles Glashier and the Phocas Exit: What Founder Transferability Looks Like in Practice
A documented Phocas founder story about bootstrapping, scaling, the 2025 sale to Accel-KKR, founder dependence and the personal realities of an exit.
Sabeer Bhatia and the Hotmail Sale: What Hindsight Can and Cannot Tell a Founder
A documented founder story about Sabeer Bhatia and Hotmail, and what the case reveals about exit decisions under uncertainty.
This week, a founder explains why she shut it down.
After six years and forty-one employees, Maren Olsen turned the key for the last time. She wants to be clear: it was not a failure. It was an ending.
Standing in the doorway of the second one.
He sold his first company at fifty-two. He opened the second a year later, smaller, on a quieter street. A conversation about what is left to prove.
The questions that sharpen the problem.
What Should a Founder Ask a Potential Acquirer Before Signing an LOI?
A founder diligence question set for evaluating an acquisition buyer beyond headline price, including strategy, funding, integration, team continuity and the founder's post-close role.
Founder Exit Transition: What Happens After a Sale?
A founder-focused framework for understanding role, team, company, control, and personal decisions after an exit.