Probably 10-15 years ago now someone I new built a dev focussed B2B SaaS company that was quite successful. I’m not sure if they ever raised investment, but they were hyper efficient and definitely not following the VC model. Profitable, very small team, and that’s how they liked it. I compared notes with the founder regularly and found it very inspirational. He didn’t want to follow the typical VC model. He wanted to build a long term company that could sustain itself. I just loved everything about what they were doing and how well they were doing it.
And then one day, completely unexpectedly (to me) I read that they’ve been acquired by a private equity firm. I reached out to find out what happened and what changed. His answer was along the lines of “turns out everyone has an exit point after all. Priorities and motivations change and I’ve given this company everything I have to give it. It’s time to explore what’s next”
I think about it a lot. And I’ve witnessed it in various ways numerous time since. People that were hacking on a side project with the idea of “I just want this to be a fun passive income stream” seeing the adoption and love their work gets suddenly thinking “oh my, there’s potential here I didn’t see before! I could build a whole team and company around this… let’s go raise investment!”.
I think we’re just really bad predictors at how achieving the things we want will impact us emotionally. When we reach those milestones we react either more positive or more negatively than we could understand previously.