🤖 #47: Vivian's Deeptech Insider: 3-minute quiz that tells you which exit your company is actually heading toward.

Hello and welcome to edition #47 of Deeptech Insider.

The startup ecosystem has a word for a $43M acquisition. Underwhelming.

The founder? Retired at 38. Mortgage gone. Optionality restored.

Here's what nobody talks about: the median startup exit sits around $40–50M. Not trending. Not making headlines. Just… quietly happening. To founders who knew what they were building toward.

The ecosystem is exceptional at one thing — getting you funded. It is considerably less useful at helping you figure out what a good outcome actually looks like for you.

The problem most founders don't see

Most founders optimise for the wrong signals. They raise capital that quietly locks them in. They pass on exits that would have worked. They stay in survival mode longer than they needed to.

I ask every founder I work with the same question early: "What does a good outcome look like — for you, not your investors?"

Most go quiet. Not because they lack ambition — because no one's ever asked them to define it on their own terms.

That's the gap I built something to address. Founders know they need to raise. They know they're building toward something. What's almost always missing is a clear view of what the actual options are — beyond the headline version of "IPO or acquisition." So I built a quiz that maps where your current decisions are pointing, and whether that aligns with what you actually want.

✅ Take the Exit Pathway Quiz Know your exit pathway in 3 minutes. See where your current decisions are pointing — before your investors or the market define it for you.

Take the quiz now →

The exit literacy gap

Only 1 in 10 founders will reach the outcome they originally had in mind when they started building.

That's not a failure of ambition. It's a failure of information.

Founders know they need to fundraise. There's an entire ecosystem built around helping them do it — accelerators, angels, VC networks, grant programmes, pitch coaches. The pathway is well-worn, well-documented, and well-supported.

Founders also know, somewhere underneath the day-to-day, that they're building toward something. A destination. A moment where the company becomes something different — or becomes someone else's. That instinct is there.

What's missing is everything in between.

Most founders have never had a clear view of what their actual options are. Not the headline version — but the real landscape. The seven distinct exit pathways that founders actually take. What each one requires. What decisions made in year two quietly foreclose options in year five. Why two founders building nearly identical companies can end up in completely different positions at the same moment, based purely on choices that didn't look like exit decisions at the time.

That's exit literacy. And the gap isn't about ambition or intelligence. It's simply that nobody teaches this — not your investors, not your accelerator, not your board. Everyone in your ecosystem is optimising for their own return. Exit literacy is about optimising for yours.

The seven exit pathways

IPO and M&A are just 3 of 7 exit pathways founders actually take:

• Strategic M&A

• Technical M&A / acqui-hire

• IPO

• Private equity buyout

• Management buyout

• Employee Ownership Trust (EOT)

• Voluntary wind-down (retained profits)

Each has its own logic, its own timing, and its own early decisions that determine whether it works. The problem isn't choosing the wrong path — it's that most founders have never consciously chosen one at all.

The quiz maps you to the pathway that fits how you're building right now. Not how you hope it goes. It's a starting point — and for most founders who take it, the first time they've seen their situation named clearly.

🔹 Discover your exit pathway See which pathway your company is actually heading toward — not just what you hope will happen.

Start the quiz →

Go deeper in May

Knowing your pathway is step one. What to do next — how to position your company, structure board and investor conversations, and avoid the decisions that silently close off your options — is what the May masterclass covers.

The Masterclass is a live session for technical founders who want to get ahead of their exit, not just react when it arrives.

• How to align current decisions with your exit pathway

• How to structure board and investor conversations

• How to avoid the mistakes that quietly foreclose your options

Join live on 21st May. Can't make it? A replay will be available for a limited time.

Join the May masterclass →

Until then,

Vivian

P.S.S. If you already know your exit pathway — and your board does too — you probably don't need this. But if there's any gap between those two things, the quiz is where to start.

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P.S.S.S. Are we connected on LinkedIn? I’m here.

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