Your Exit Strategy Starts on Day One

Most founders think about exits when they're exhausted, when growth has stalled, or when an unsolicited offer lands in their inbox. By then, the structural decisions that determine your optionality have already been made — and most of them are working against you.

I've sat on both sides of the deal table for over a hundred transactions. The single biggest predictor of whether a founder gets the outcome they want isn't market timing or product-market fit. It's whether they engineered the company to be sellable from the very first cap table entry.

Here's what 'starting on day one' actually means in practice: clean equity structures, defensible IP assignment, founder vesting that survives co-founder departures, customer contracts that transfer, and a single source of financial truth from month one. None of this is glamorous. All of it is leverage.

When you reach the point of negotiating a Series A — or, eventually, a sale — the diligence checklist is brutal and unforgiving. Every shortcut you took in year one becomes a discount in year five. Every clean decision compounds.

The exit isn't the end of the story. It's the constraint you optimize around from the day you incorporate. Build accordingly.