Hans De Leenheer writes on his blog:
Starting a new company by it’s nature means you are a business man! Otherwise you’d be going with your ideas to your CTO and just switch companies if he/she didn’t listen. From a business man’s point of view that technology idea needs to bring in some cash. So here are the three options:
- Selling to the highest bidder only comes to mind when there is someone to make an offer that you are willing to take. Most small startups hope for this mostly because the problem they are solving appears to be a “single feature solution”.
- Going Public is an option a lot of those smaller startups are now alluding to. Two that jump to mind here recently are Violin Memory and FusionIO. Both haven’t done pretty well this far … The reasons IMO here are that no-one was buying FusionIO for the price they wanted and no-one needs Violin Memory anymore. And none of them would have made it as an independent company in the long run anyhow. This is for me the biggest danger all of those small startups are facing right now! Going IPO for the wrong reason; cashing in for the investors before it gets worse.
- Growing independently (no exit!) is the dream of every startup founder! Actually IPO and independent are the same result from a product/customer perspective, the only difference is that in the independent company it’s still all your own money.
Hans has some great thoughts on the startup exit of two recent companies. Nimble is now public, PHD Virtual is now a part of Unitrends. Read on for some interesting perspective, especially around the PHD Virtual acquisition.
Read more: Where is the EXIT route? My thoughts on Nimble Storage & PHDvirtual
