Exit strategy usually gets written as a slide in a fundraising deck, which is the least useful moment to think about it. This is the version for a founder who actually has a company: every ending available, what each requires, and what it does to you, your team and your investors.
Click one to read it properly. Ordered roughly by how often they happen, which is close to the reverse of how often they're discussed.
A holding company buys you to own and operate indefinitely. Cash at close, no fund clock, no resale planned. This is what we do, so treat the enthusiasm accordingly: the structural claim is that an owner with no exit deadline behaves differently, and you can verify that from their documents rather than their website.
$2M to $10M in ARR and a business someone can run
60 days to 4 months
Continuity. The company keeps operating as itself
You won't get a strategic buyer's price. What you get instead is certainty, speed and a company that still exists in the same shape in five years.
The distribution is worth staring at, because almost all founder attention goes to the two rarest outcomes and almost none to the two most common.
The plan for how ownership of your company eventually changes hands: acquisition, buyout, management buyout, wind-down or a public listing. Worth a real answer once you have revenue and staff, rather than the deck slide version written for investors.
Curious is a long-term holding company that buys and grows software companies with empathy.
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