Instead of IPOs and acquisitions, exiting to community is one alternative

Outside of the open web, email, and text, there isn’t a scaled D2C channel that is not controlled by a major platform. So the primary way that startups have to reach customers today is via paid acquisition. That’s why the question an investor asks today to a startup that is scaling is: where are you buying audience and what are your customer acqui

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Usually, the exit is when the startup gets sold to a bigger, generally more boring company, or when it “goes public” on a stock market and pieces of it get passed among countless buyers and sellers. That’s when investors, along with founders and early employees, get their payday. But for startups that build communities—of users, or workers, or whom... See more