Exiting Your Business: The Playlist

Lessons Learned in 17 Years Building and Exiting a SaaS Company: Gail Goodman

Gail considers some of the things she has learned about marketing and serving SMB customers, about the software industry and about leadership along the path to a scale business. She also shares her thoughts behind the ultimate sale of the company, something she describes as good for customers, for employees and for shareholders, even if it was a bittersweet process for her personally.

Here I Go Again. Why My Second Startup is Different: Nick Halstead

Nick discusses some of the things that he has learned at DataSift he is applying to his new startup, from deciding when to take money, the good and bad of relying on large partners, dealing with organisational change in a high growth business and coping with the everyday stresses and strains of running a business in hyper-growth mode as a first time founder with a young family.

10 Years Of Balsamiq – What I’ve Learned: Peldi Guilizzoni

Peldi shares another honest update about his worries in Balsamiq’s milestone 10th year. On realizing he’s still too integral to the business, Peldi started the ‘Winter 2018 Injected Turbulence Project’ – delegated product design and engineering management, deleted Slack and twitter from his phone, and stopped watching their internal wiki.

Leadership Lessons from Growth & Exit: Bill Spruill

Bill shares three leadership lessons in his 10+ year journey co-founding, building and selling Global Data Consortium to the London Stock Exchange Group in 2022. GDC has experienced 120% YoY growth with a global team of employees across six time zones.

He discusses his experience building and selling the company successfully so that he could pursue a new goal, to support the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Raleigh, NC.

Dancing with Elephants: Suresh Menon

Suresh explains how mature businesses approach acquisitions as part of a growth strategy, usually as an alternative to building capability in-house. He discusses how an acquirer evaluates their options and approach a deal. Most important, talks about making an acquisition work in the long term – for the acquirer and acquired team.