The Silicon Valley Dream vs Reality Check Everyone talks about IPOs. The glory. The headlines. The unicorn status. But here's the truth that shocked me: Startups are 16X more likely to be acquired than go public. Let that sink in. Why aren't we talking about this more? • Most founders secretly stress about exit strategies • The "IPO or bust" mentality creates unnecessary pressure • Acquisition conversations feel taboo But look at these success stories: → MosaicML: $1.3B acquisition by Databricks → Nervana: $408M acquisition by Intel → Drawbridge: $300M acquisition by LinkedIn The real secret? Building something valuable enough that bigger players want to integrate it into their ecosystem. This is why at Posybl, we're revolutionizing the startup journey: 1. No-code Bubble development 2. AI-powered MVP building 3. Faster go-to-market strategy 4. Cost-effective compared to traditional coding 5. Focus on building real value, not just chasing IPOs Because whether you exit through acquisition or IPO, what matters is building something worth buying. Time to shift the conversation from "How do we IPO?" to "How do we create real value?" P.S. Curious - what's your ideal exit strategy? IPO dreams or strategic acquisition? Let's discuss! 💭
Muhammad Qaiser Tariq’s Post
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🌟 Staying Private is the New IPO! 🚀 In recent years, secondary share sales from just seven standout companies—such as Stripe, Canva, and Databricks—have surpassed proceeds from all tech IPOs. Here's what the numbers reveal: 🔹 Funding Billions Privately: Companies are opting to raise capital away from the uncertain tides of public markets. 🔹 Liquidity Without the Spotlight: Founders and early employees are achieving liquidity events without the glare of public scrutiny. Is this the future of tech financing? Or a strategic response to market unpredictability? 💡 Join the conversation and share your thoughts on where we’re headed. Could staying private be the key to unlocking sustainable growth? #TechFinance #PrivateFunding #Startups #Innovation #FutureOfFinance #SecondaryMarkets
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🤼 Early-stage hiring is make or break for startups This week on Scale, Aryaman Banerjee and I interview Anish Dhar on how he built one of Palo Alto's highest-performing SaaS teams at Cortex (backed by Sequoia Capital, Y Combinator, and IVP) Anish outlines how he thinks about hiring if you're building in a new market: #1 Form your baseline. Hire from people from an adjacent industry #2 You’re looking for people who can push. This needs to be tested in a variety of ways. Find out how much they care about their work, and how deeply they understand their work. #3 Understand their relationship with their colleagues. This has a direct relationship with how much they’ll respect their time and work. More details in the comments 👇
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As we close the year (and boy what a year it has been!), I wanted to share our latest feature video and a few thoughts on this journey. 🚀 • Started building from scratch in May • Accelerated through Techstars • Released MVP over summer ☀️ • Hit $300k in revenues • Our users log in on average 7/day, spending up to 2hrs/day on platform 🙀 • Closed 70% of pre-seed round in 3 weeks (during holidays!) We keep hearing: you've built this from scratch since May and hit revenues quickly. That means everyone can do the same and you have no "moats"? Well, not really... 🤔 Here's what's behind the speed: ⚡ • Years of thinking about this through lived experience • Hundreds of user interviews before building • Tight feedback loop with our design partner • Team that's worked together for 3 years • Techstars incredible mentor network • LLMs to scale (from co-pilot for coding through Claude for marketing) • Co-location to skip endless zoom calls So we might have built this in a few months but you're paying us for all of the above :) I feel so much gratitude for everyone on this journey. From our team's 80+ hour weeks, our mentors' guidance, Techstars Workforce Development Accelerator' springboard, to our investors who believed in our vision (despite a few failed demos ;) 🙏 This was a tough and beautiful year - maybe beautiful because it was tough. Time to warm up with some gluhwein, disconnect for a moment with family and friends, and come back recharged for an even bigger 2025. 🙌 Happy holidays everyone! ✨ #Techstars #StartupLyfe #Mergers #CorpDev #AI #GenAI #Entrepreneurship #EarlyStageStartup
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🔥 Top 8 IPO Candidates! And 3 out of 8 in Axevil portfolio 😎 A new episode of the popular podcast "This Week in Startups" is out, hosted by Jason Calacanis, one of the early investors in Uber. One segment that really stood out was about the upcoming IPO expectations in this cycle. Jason, along with Alex Wilhelm (recently the lead writer at TechCrunch), shared their opinions on who will go public next. The key point is that after a series of IPOs at the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 (Instacart, Reddit, Rubrik, etc.), some amazing companies could go public RIGHT NOW! Alex highlights a list of 8 companies as the top contenders, briefly pitching each one (3 of them are in Axevil Capital's portfolio): 1️⃣⚡️ Databricks (in Axevil portfolio)— $2.4 billion ARR, 60% YoY growth, a rich history in AI, super smart founders, and a huge market; 2️⃣ Gusto — a leader in HR+fintech, over $500 million ARR (mid-2023), with one of the broadest product offerings on the market; 3️⃣⚡️ Kraken (in Axevil portfolio) — top 2 player in the US and #1 in the EU, expected revenue for 2024 is $1-2 billion, P/S multiplier to align with Coinbase, currently raising a $100 million pre-IPO round, with institutional approval for a BTC ETF; 4️⃣ Circle — transparent stablecoin USDC gaining traction, large volumes, confidentially filed for an IPO in early 2024; 5️⃣ Turo — a profitable car rental service, but revenue growth slowed to 18% in 2023, filed for IPO back in 2021 and has been publishing reports quarterly since; 6️⃣ Shein — Chinese marketplace growing at 40% YoY with GMV reaching $32 billion, 5% profit margin, likely to list in London; 7️⃣⚡️ Stripe (in Axevil portfolio) — fintech giant, leading globally in volume and breadth of product offerings. The #1 service for running a business; 8️⃣ Intercom — excellent SaaS product helping businesses automate customer communications and save budgets, with very low market multipliers, a great buying opportunity; ⚡️ It looks like we are on the verge of a real breakthrough. We expect even more IPO filings soon. Especially considering there are quite a few candidates with revenues approaching $1 billion. Exciting news ahead! See full podcast here https://lnkd.in/dPHEj3VZ
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For some starting a start up just comes naturally
Some VCs only back second-time founders 📈 But the reality is, most founders are first-time founders. This got me thinking: who are the first-time founders who have absolutely crushed it? Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia - Airbnb IPO Date: December 10, 2020 Market Cap on IPO Day: $86.5 billion Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy - Snap Inc. (Future freshman) IPO Date: March 2, 2017 Market Cap on IPO Day: $24 billion Melanie Perkins - Canva (Fusion Books) IPO Date: 2025 Valuation: $26 billion (as of 2024, private company) Ben Silbermann - Pinterest (Tote) IPO Date: April 18, 2019 Market Cap on IPO Day: $12.7 billion Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger - Instagram (Burbn) Sale Date: April 9, 2012 Sale Price: $1 billion (acquired by Facebook) Andrew Mason - Groupon IPO Date: November 4, 2011 Market Cap on IPO Day: $12.7 billion Dylan Field - Figma Acquisition Offer: $20 billion (from Adobe) If you’re a first-time founder, just know that everyone is out here experimenting and figuring things out as they go...trust me. #startups #venturecapital #founders ____ Enjoy this? Follow Kevin Jurovich for daily startup & VC insights and the occasional meme. ✌️
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Are you a founder evaluating potential exit paths? The best time to sell your company was in 2021 but now might be a good time to sell at a fair valuation. Here’s why 👇 Tech companies have been the M&A protagonists for the past 2 decades. Acquirers like Google and Microsoft poured billions into aggressive M&A strategies, strengthening their market position and creating the tech value chain 👇 1. Capital was cheap due to ZIRP, so VCs poured money into early-stage companies 2. Some of these companies grew fast with cheap money, so they either got acquired or went public 3. Exits meant payday for founders, VCs, investment banks, legal firms and the broader tech sector 4. More capital was poured into the tech sector, and the cycle began again… ♻️ But the music stopped at the party when The Fed cut interest rates in 2022. Capital became expensive and scarce almost overnight: - Active buyers went conservative for the first time in decades - The IPO market dried up, making exits even less likely than they already were. Valuations + market conditions haven’t been the best for founders ever since. 𝗕𝘂𝘁 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗙𝗲𝗱 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗲𝗻 𝗰𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗽𝗮𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗵𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗲𝗮𝗿. That’s why we’re seeing a slight uptick in M&A activity, particularly in tech. This might be the light at the end of the tunnel for founders looking at potential exit scenarios in the next few months. My takeaways: - Fundamentals are shifting. Tech is no longer the moat it was, as AI is disrupting competitive dynamics - Bigtech buyers might not be the protagonists in this new M&A era, so I’d expect to see a new generation of aggressive buyers 👀 - Nobody knows if and for how long rate cuts will continue, so I’d consider that to accelerate decision-making. Thoughts? 💬 #startups #acquisitions #mna #buyside #sellside #dealmakers Image credit: Visual Capitalist.
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💰🔍 The price tags of the top 15 tech companies that went public recently: then vs. now! Most startups have either held steady or boosted their valuations as public companies. 🚀✨ This could be a solid sign for those eyeing an IPO but hitting the brakes due to market jitters! #TechTrends #IPOInsights
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A lot of startup stock option plans have failed to deliver lately. I'm seeing some harsh words on this platform about this category of comp. Still, I think calling startup stock options a 'lotto ticket' is an oversimplification. Stock options are always a gamble, but you can stack the odds in your favor by looking at the following indicators: 1. What do the founders consider to be a 'good outcome'? Your odds of making anything on your options are inversely related to mentions of IPO, TechCrunch fame, world domination. Your odds are much better if founders are eyeing a quiet exit to a PE or closely aligned strategic buyer while the company is in growth mode. 2. What is the 'thesis' of current investors? Everyone talks about VCs needing home runs to cover the bets that don't pay, but the reality is there are plenty of investors that have a thesis around a high rate of singles, doubles and triples. Smaller funds aren't generally expecting the next Meta. They are happy to sign off on more modest outcomes. 3. Ratio of current revenue to capital invested. At any given moment, a company that has raised capital inline with its revenue growth is in a much healthier position to exit. If a company fronted its growth with a big slug of VC, it's going to be a long grind before an exit makes sense.
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Great insights from my colleague Nate Leung on how secondaries can offer much-needed flexibility for startups, and GPs and liquidity for LPs - especially in today's venture market where liqudity is hard to come by as the exit markets have been quiet. Secondaries can help salvage liquidity and commitment plans that no longer fit today’s realities. Nate Leung shares four key criteria to consider when evaluating secondaries options. 👇 #VentureCapital #Secondaries #openlp
The secondary market saw $112B in total deal volume in 2023 alone, and in today’s venture market where liquidity is hard to come by, secondaries are a vital tool for startups and investors. They provide much-needed cash flow without signaling distress. Nate Leung, Partner at Sapphire Sapphire Partners, shares insights in a recent Secondaries Investor byline on how secondaries can boost employee morale, attract new hires, and restore momentum for startups facing delayed IPOs or layoffs. He highlights four key questions for startup founders and employees, LPs and GPs to ask before considering secondaries: 1️⃣ What are you looking to solve for liquidity-wise? 2️⃣What’s driving your liquidity needs? 3️⃣Has your team or investment strategy changed? 4️⃣How have your risk/return expectations changed? Read the full article in the comments. #VentureCapital #Startups
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I chatted with VC general partners recently, and they shared something obvious but still very important for startup founders that is often missed. To succeed, you need three critical roles among the founders: Sales, Product, and Engineer. ✅ Sales is the person who gets customers and drives revenue. ✅ Product is the visionary who shapes the product and keeps it on track with customers' real needs. ✅ Engineer is the one who builds the product and makes it work. Having these three roles covered is crucial! It balances the team and covers all the bases. 💡 If you're starting something new, ensure these roles are in place. It can make all the difference. #StartupLife #Founders #Teamwork #Fintech
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