Exit Path: How to Win the Startup End Game

Introduction

I will never forget the panic I felt in January of 2009, when amidst a historic global financial crisis I had to find a way to sell our startup, Jaxtr, before running out of cash six months later. We were not at all prepared for this turn of events. In the prior three years, we had raised nearly $20 million from top-tier Silicon Valley investors in successive oversubscribed rounds. Jaxtr had won numerous awards and quickly risen to prominence with over 10 million registered users. Everything seemed to confirm that we were well on our path to achieve our mission, which was to end the era of global telecom monopolies by bringing free calling and texting over the internet to all mobile phones. In that way, Jaxtr was the interim step ...