Before you take that step most people never dare to take, a lot has probably already happened. Maybe you’ve been lying awake at night, too wired up to sleep because your idea feels too good to waste time sleeping. Maybe you’ve spent every waking hour over the past year thinking about your idea, every bit of free time building on it, and every conversation pitching it. It won’t let go of you—so you have to let go of something else. Your safe job, for instance. Because doing anything else would go against your brain’s synapses, your gut’s vibrations, and your cells’ very autofagy.
Maybe it’s not even the idea itself that’s as brilliant as your unbalanced behavior suggests. Maybe it’s the idea of following your idea - the freedom it promises - that keeps you absent by day and awake by night. Because we all know that the first idea will evolve, crumble, dissolve, and pivot. But the vision and ambition of having your own company - with your own rules, culture, and values - stand firm like the concrete pillar in the middle of a shifting exhibition hall.
That leap throws you into the hardest and most beautiful thing there is: bootstrapping. Every penny matters, every customer interaction counts. Soon you find yourself in the capital chase anyway. Because you think you need capital to grow. Capital to keep up. Capital to deliver on customer promises you can’t yet fulfill. Capital to create even more promises for even more customers. A spiral of cost-based scalability. Bootstrapping is hard - and slow - and in the tech world, “slow” is a dirty word.
You prepare a pitch deck filled with hockey-stick graphs, bold projections, roadmaps, team achievements, and a market slide proving it’s a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. At the investor meeting, you’re inevitably asked:
“What’s your exit strategy?”
What is your exit strategy? Really. Do you even want one?
That thing you couldn’t stop thinking about, the dream that kept you awake - you’re now supposed to have a plan to leave it? Within 5–7 years, tops. Then comes the exit. Because how else will the investors get their return? Their funds must close within ten years, and a few of those years have probably almost passed. You just stepped into the freedom you’ve been craving - the autonomy to create something with your own hands and mind. And now you’re expected to plan your departure.
It’s like standing at the altar with the love of your life and, in your wedding vows, including a detailed plan for when and how the divorce will happen.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to create a strategy for building a company you don’t want to exit? A strategy focused on freedom, creativity, and longevity. I call this antithesis to the exit strategy an exist strategy. The focus is on continuing to exist—not on having a future deadline for when it all ends.
Let’s compare these two strategies that rarely coexist.