| Most of that sounds pretty good, but I have to disagree with this bit: Ask yourself: would you sell your company? Would you sell it for $20 million? If you answered yes, at this stage, find a new idea. You don’t love it enough. That strikes me as an over-generalized view. Different people have different circumstances that are going to affect that decision. Somebody who has already had a successful exit and is already set financially, or someone who is very young, might have a different threshold for when they would or wouldn't sell, versus someone who's older and who has never had an exit. In my own case, as a 37 year old who's never had the "big exit" I can say that there are few - if any - ideas that I wouldn't sell for $20 million (assuming I owned a significant chunk of equity at exit and was going to be walking away with multiple millions of dollars personally.) Sorry, but the chance to assure myself of financial independence now and for the foreseeable future, and to buy myself the ability to work on whatever I want in the future, could conceivably trump my allegiance to pretty much any idea I might be working on at the moment. I'm not saying it would necessarily be a slam dunk decision, or a decision I'd make on the spur of the moment... but it would be awfully tough to say no to an exit like that, knowing that I'm not getting any younger, and that another chance might not come along. That said, if I were running a company, and owned enough equity to maintain control, and had to face that decision, I would say "no" if I believed the $20 million exit was far less than what we would eventually achieve, and/or if staying the course were the right thing to help more of the founders / early employees ultimately realize their own degree of financial freedom. |
Would we have sold our company for $20 mil? Hell yes. But we went in to Y Combinator excited about an exit and we stunted the growth of our company by shooting for dollars instead of stars.