Chapter 8Rewire Your Brain: Getting Into Exit Mode
Our first serious M&A meeting was with a multi-trillion dollar tech company I had admired my entire career. It was the kind of place that, if I’m honest, I’d dreamed about working for back when we were still coding in a cramped apartment. It also happened to be where my wife, Charis, worked at the time, and in the days leading up to the meeting, my imagination ran wild.
I remember thinking how nice it would be to carpool to work together in the mornings, grab lunch in the same cafeteria, maybe even take a walk around the courtyard during breaks. After years of startup chaos—late nights, missed dinners, and weekends spent debugging instead of resting—the thought of working near her felt like some kind of cosmic reward.
The lead-up to the meeting only fueled the fantasy. Our bankers said that their initial meeting went really well and their team knew who we were and were fans of our products. Their emails were warm, full of familiarity, almost as if we had been close colleagues for years. We spent days preparing slides, rehearsing talking points, researching each person on the meeting invite list so we could tailor our pitch to their backgrounds.
The meeting itself went incredibly well—or so I thought. It ran longer than the allotted time. They asked detailed questions. They nodded in all the right places. When it ended, we exchanged pleasantries and promises to “continue the conversation.” I walked out of that conference room on a cloud, convinced this could be it—the perfect fit, the dream acquirer.
Then… silence.
A week passed. Then two. Then a month. Nothing. No follow-up email, no “thank you for your time,” not even a polite rejection. Just radio silence.
That was the first of many such experiences, but it hit the hardest. I learned that in M&A, the quiet afterward isn’t personal—it’s just how the process works. Buyers explore dozens of opportunities in parallel, and most of them never go anywhere. Still, that silence stings in a way no founder is ever prepared for.
And that’s when I realized something I wish someone had told me earlier: selling your company requires an entirely different operating system for your brain.
Working through an M&A is an entirely different sport from running a company. If building a startup is all about endurance, selling a startup is about doing whatever it takes to live to fight for another day. Scott Belsky calls it “the last mile in a marathon race” in The Messy Middle—and he’s right. The last mile looks deceptively short, but it demands a different kind of stamina, patience, and mental elasticity. You have to train your mind to operate in uncertainty for months, sometimes years, without breaking.
Because here’s what M&A really feels like: one day, you’re on top of the world—term sheet signed, champagne toasts, congratulatory texts pouring in. A week later, your inbox goes silent. The same people who once responded within hours stop replying altogether. You start checking your phone every five minutes like it’s a lifeline. Multiply that cycle by a dozen false starts, and you begin to understand why exits drive founders insane.
Nothing prepares you for it.
The first thing you have to do is reset your baseline expectation: assume no deal will happen. Not even for a dollar. Tell yourself that you’ll continue building alone, that life goes on with or without an acquisition. It sounds pessimistic, but it’s actually liberating. The moment you stop believing an exit is inevitable, you regain control of your sanity. Anything beyond survival becomes upside.
Then comes acceptance: you’re no longer running the company you want—you’re running the company that can be acquired.
This was one of the hardest pills I had to swallow. Early in the process, I remember leaving a meeting with a potential buyer feeling physically sick. We had just agreed to prioritize a particular feature that wasn’t even our core focus, simply because it aligned better with their roadmap. Walking out of that Zoom call, I felt like a sellout. It took me weeks to admit that it wasn’t betrayal—it was strategy.
To sell, you have to temporarily trade creative control for positioning. That means making peace with decisions that aren’t pure to your original mission but increase your company’s attractiveness to others. It’s not selling out; it’s just how this business works. The faster you reconcile that truth, the smoother the process becomes.
Another lesson: take full responsibility.
In fundraising, you can lean on investors to open doors. In M&A, you’re on your own. Your board won’t find you a buyer. Your investors won’t negotiate on your behalf. Your bankers, if you have them, can amplify interest but can’t create it. Nobody knows your business better than you, and nobody can sell it better than you. That’s your job—to articulate the story, rally your team, and steer everyone—employees, investors, and yourself—across the finish line.
It’s easy to fall into the illusion that someone else will “make it happen.” They won’t. You started this company. You’re the one who has to land it.
You also have to learn to let go of expectations—especially the ones others put on you. When investors write their first checks, they believe that you have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. When the media covers you, they call you “the next big thing.” But markets change, and reality rarely plays along. Even Google kills billion-dollar projects. Your worth as a founder isn’t tied to your company’s outcome. I had to remind myself of that constantly. Someone who sells for ten times your price isn’t ten times better than you—they just landed in a different market at a different moment.
The only metric that matters is whether you did right by your people and left the company better than you found it.
Once you’re in exit mode, flexibility becomes your superpower. Your previous roadmap no longer matters; the only roadmap that does is the one that gets you to a close. Buyers will ask for proof of partnerships, product adjustments, and even small integrations that fit their ecosystem. Roll with it. Treat every interaction as both a negotiation and a rehearsal for working together. Deals die when founders cling to plans that no longer serve the goal.
Before you engage, clean your house. Buyers can smell dysfunction from a mile away. If you have an underperforming team, fix it. If there’s a product that’s dragging you down, cut it. If you’ve been putting off tough decisions for months, make them now. No one buys a fixer-upper. When you’re preparing for an exit, imagine you’re staging a house for sale—fresh paint, uncluttered rooms, clear story. Even if the deal falls through, your company will be stronger for it.
And as the process drags on, distance yourself emotionally from the day-to-day noise.
During M&A, you’ll disappear from your own company for stretches at a time. You’ll have to. Most of the discussions, due diligence, and negotiations happen behind closed doors. Your team won’t know what’s going on, and you won’t be able to tell them. That can feel dishonest, especially if transparency has been your cultural mantra. But oversharing creates false hope—and nothing kills morale faster than a deal that collapses after you’ve already let the team in on the details.
The truth is, silence is a form of protection. You’re protecting their focus so they can keep doing their best work while you navigate chaos in the background.
Finally, accept this sobering truth: sometimes, there’s simply no buyer. You can have great revenue, cutting-edge technology, and a loyal team—and still find yourself in a market with no demand. That’s not failure; that’s timing. You can’t control who’s buying, only how ready you are when they are.
Going through an M&A is like walking a tightrope between hope and heartbreak. The only way to stay balanced is to build a mindset that can handle both.
Once you’ve rewired your brain to accept that reality, you can start preparing for the hardest scenario of all—the one most founders never want to think about: what to do when no acceptable offer ever comes.
That’s where we go next.