#executive-strategy

Incredibly helpful! Thanks for sharing.

@Frederick Stokkelaar How do you look at things from the other side?

this is amazing to read, thanks a lot for sharing Mitesh!

I sold my first business in 2016 as a legal merger, where us and the much bigger competitor created a new holding company for the shares of of both our companies. My cofounder and I held 18% and the German competitor founders+investors held the rest.

I personally wanted this instead of an earn-out, because I liked the German founders and wanted to stay a cofounder. But in reality I was the outsider and I never found my place.

So I left after 6 months. I still hold <1% of the shares, and the company does close to €100m revenue. But they raised and burned so much cash over the years (€78m preferred shares) and have never been truly profitable, so the exit valuation will never be high enough to cover preferred shares and debt stack, thereby making my shares worthless.

My learning from this is if I sell a majority of my current company, I need a clean exit. Which means the company needs to be able to run well without me and my cofounder/wife. We are not there yet, and I love running it, but getting a management team in place that can make us founders dispensable would be my step 1. And once that team is in place I would spend majority of my time on dealmaking.

Thank you, super valuable!

Hi Kasper, you're absolutely right. The management team we have is worth its weight in gold.

I'm also sorry to hear about your previous exit - that said it's a great lesson to learn given you've clearly got some entrepreneurial spirit if you've managed to make a second succesful business! Much easier to avoid those pitfalls next time around

Thanks for sharing! @Mitesh Desai