Startup CXO

Chapter 106Selling Your Company: Preparation

At some point in a company's journey there will be an opportunity to sell the company or raise another round and you will be pulled in to sell‐side diligence. The time to prepare for that is months or years before, not when it happens.

Now, of course, companies get opportunistic offers before they are ready to sell and get the process done without preparing well in advance, but from my experience, there are certain areas that you want to track from the beginning that make a sale process go easier. And, since the goal of most businesses is to grow and eventually sell, why not invest in this work upfront? So, one key for a successful sale is preparation. The other key is being able to tell a good story about the stage the business is at and the processes that are in place that make sense for that stage. Let's dig into both of these. Chapter 107 covers telling the story.

Preparation

The product leader needs to start at an early stage in the company's existence with preparation. The things to prepare are a mirror of the items I listed in Chapter 105 that are typically included in a buy‐side diligence engagement:

Licenses and Intellectual Property

Track any commercial and open source licenses in use. It's also a good practice to have a policy across Engineering to enforce the types of licenses that are allowed and which ones require leadership sign‐off. If you publish open source as a company, you should also have a practice or policy ...