When Your Exit Strategy Dream Is My Customer Nightmare

After a brutal experience chewed up in one of these opportunistic exit machines, I now assume this is the default position of any new company, particularly those looking to cash in on AI before the legal apocalypse over data provenance takes hold.

Maybe this is just my read of this, but it seems like the author is extrapolating a lot of intent from very little here…

Is it possible the project has few employees and little revenue precisely because they don’t want a massive exit? Or is it possible they declined his request not because they’re chasing growth-at-all-costs and instead because they thought of this random LinkedIn message as simply another distraction from a developer who (statistically for random reach outs) might have wasted their time long term? Even if you fund it, it still might not be worth it for the developers, might be a distraction for their roadmap, might be a low value feature, random-LinkedIn-man may withdraw funding in the future or be a nightmare to work with… seems like there are more possible reasons he got a no than just “they’re obsessed with an exit.”

I’m open to being wrong here, but I see a guy who is mad that a startup declined his feature request.

I sometimes wonder if the best way to dominate a market would be to grow sustainable and wait out the competition until they crash themself with their self sabotaging strategy of unhealthy, exploitive behavior. This article was just, what I needed to read today.

What a wonderful article/anecdote.

I have and will always be an advocate of human connections. My experience of working across a number of agencies and startups has been the best focus on that (though it can be hard to sustain).

I would love to work with people and at places that understand and realise the value of this.

I remember at a big client, a certain product for part of the tech stack (sry for being this vague) was declined as a contender as 'the (EU) company behind this product only has 200 employees'. For the US reader: from a European perspective, a 200 person EU software company is not exactly a fly by night operation as we do not have the VC space the US enjoys.

Also, very early in my career, I got burned on a project by building on what IBM at the time touted as their next future platform for the SME space, only to see it discontinued the next year. Glad I payed my learning cost this early on a relatively small project.

The worst experience for me is changing directors/C-level to maximize the exit profit, between the lines of "disagreements over company policy" can be many things, but one major pain is culture changes which drives down everything, once the company stimulating the healthy place and then creates a disturbed one where we can't grow and deliver our better solutions only for money.

It's simplistic, but I think there's two ways you can approach building a product company.

Either you focus on creating a great product that customers love. As a consequence, you'll hopefully make some money.

Or you focus on making a truckload of money as quick as possible, and building a product is merely a means to an end.

As OP said, there's far too few companies choosing the first approach, and far too many choosing the second one.

I wish there were more people like this.

Ah, it's our weekly "MBA's have no passion" blog post, but this time in disguise. Yes, yes, I agree, and heard it before: creatives study into art, techies study into engineering, and hollow shells with no love for anything study into business. Blight on society, the lot of them, bears repeating.

But I gone a step further. Things won't really change within my lifespan so... I just took to a more pessimistic, and less empathetic outlook. I'll flip back to optimism at some point.

hugely agree. exit is usually where the incentive misalignment between platform owners and users begins to diverge.

I believe that making everyone an owner of the platform could help to fix this (basically stakeholder capitalism, using well-designed programmable equity structures), and now is a great time to try it.

That's the main reason I avoid using any products from startups. I just know that in a few years, the company will die out or exit, and in both cases product I would rely on will be discontinued, or shittified by the new owner.

The only exceptions are open source products with a healthy community, where I can evaluate their possibility of survival after vendor shutdown, or commodity services, where I can count that I could replace them with something similar with a minimal effort.

I’ve concluded that products/services which feel too good to be true, are probably just that. Just a mater of time until VC/PE money want to collect their pound of flesh, and the enshitification begins.

Either that, or the startup just ceases to exist - after a M&A has taken place.