---
slug: exit
type: concept
created: 2026-05-26
updated: 2026-05-29
---

# Exit

Every venture-backed company is built toward a liquidity event, even when no one is talking about it, because the fund structure behind the capital requires one. For most companies that event is an acquisition, not an initial public offering — the great majority of US venture-backed exits are acquisitions — and the mechanics of getting there are unfamiliar to founders precisely because most of them only do it once. This part of the lifecycle covers the paths out and the negotiations that decide how much of the value created along the way actually reaches the people who created it.

The entries cover the acquisition in its several forms — the talent-driven acqui-hire, the full product acquisition, the consolidation play — and the machinery that comes with it: the letter of intent, representations and warranties, escrow, earn-outs, and the planning horizon that starts long before a buyer appears. They cover the decision between an IPO and an acquisition, with the quantitative thresholds that gate the public path and the qualitative factors — founder liquidity, investor timelines, competitive dynamics — that tip the choice. They cover the interim path that most venture-backed shareholders now touch first: the tender offer and the wider secondary market, where founders and early employees turn private shares into cash without the company exiting at all, a route whose dollar volume has come to rival that of public listings. And they situate all of it against the current market, where the public window has reopened for select companies while acquisitions remain the dominant terminal route, and where buyers in 2025–2026 reward capital efficiency, clean governance, and durable revenue over the growth-at-all-costs story of the previous cycle.

The terms set years earlier — the liquidation preference, the cap-table structure, the governance provisions — come due here, which is why the founding and fundraising sections quietly determine how an exit feels even when the headline number is good. An exit read correctly is the moment the whole lifecycle resolves; read carelessly, it is where a successful-looking outcome turns out to have been mostly someone else's.

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- [Next: Acquisition Exit](acquisition-exit.md)
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