The Exit Podcast

This week on The Exit: After building a solar powered race car that raced from Chicago to LA with his uni friends, Will Sacks realized his call was to build things… Including a platform that would revolutionize women’s reproductive health, helping them understand their bodies, tracking their cycles and analyzing their fertility data. Listen to hear his exit story.

This week on The Exit: Don McLaughlin was working as an inhouse lawyer for a consulting firm that served the Fortune 500 when he decided to start his own legal tech startup. After turning down two multi-million offers, and learning how to manage the emotional toll that heading a fast-growing business had on him, Don successfully exited his business. This is his story.

This week on The Exit: John Knific started Wisr.io, a digital platform allowing colleges and universities to create private, university-branded networks for their students. Being one of the only virtual connectivity solutions available for students, Wisr.io saw astronomical growth when COVID hit. In 45 days, the business generated double the revenue they had made in the past three years. In 2021 a potential partner made them a compelling acquisition offer that ultimately resulted in an exit.

Heikki Haldre’s entrepreneurial journey had a bumpy start, but continued with numerous successful exits, including one to Japanese technology conglomerate, Rakuten, the sixth largest Ecommerce company in the world. With four exits under his belt, Heikki has a wealth of knowledge to share about how to find potential buyers. Listen to find out more.

Eddie Whittingham left the police force to become a lawyer. He never expected to eventually leave law to start his own cybersecurity business, which he then sold to Proofpoint, one of the biggest SaaS-based cybersecurity companies in the world. This is his exit story.

Givzey CEO and Founder Adam Martel is featured on Flippa’s latest episode of The Exit podcast. From the schoolyard to the early days at Babson College – Adam shares why he’s focused on innovating in the Give Now, Pay Later space, and his amazing entrepreneurial and exit journey.

This week on The Exit. From a young age Marty Fahncke had an entrepreneurial drive. Before he got into M&A Advisory, he was involved in a number of exits, and the knowledge he has gained from those exits is invaluable.

This week on The Exit. Lee Blaylock is a third generation entrepreneur: both his grandfather and father were real estate entrepreneurs, so Lee was bound to become one. He just needed to find a compelling idea at the right time.

This week on The Exit: Bob remembers the very first time he logged into AOL and thinking “I’ve got to be a part of this internet thing”. After Bob cut his professional teeth at Procter & Gamble, one of the world’s largest consumer goods companies, he jumped head first into the startup space.

Adam started AdLibertas as a mobile advertising business, but after a few years, it was clear that scaling the business was hard, unless it pivoted. That’s when the company shifted focus from advertising to analyzing data to solve business problems for their clients. When it came to exiting the business, it was surprisingly easy to find a buyer. Branch, a Silicon Valley unicorn which is currently preparing for an IPO, had come to AdLibertas looking for a content partnership, but they quickly turned into a potential acquirer.

This week on The Exit: In freshman year, Yuxin wanted to improve his grades with new classes, but he soon realized finding the right ones through his uni’s system was a painful process. That’s when he and a friend decided to build a better class search system. It wasn’t easy, but once they finalized the system, the website took off. After 2 years they were generating over 1M sessions annually, so they monetized the site and watched profit coming in. The site was so successful, it was covering their university fees. With such a winning model, it’s no surprise that the university they were studying at wanted to acquire the business… Listen to find out how their exit went down. 

This week on The Exit: How do you exit a travel business during a global lockdown? When Cyrus Ghazanfar co-founded Pilota, a machine learning product to predict the risk of flight disruptions, he never imagined that every flight in the world would be grounded in just a few months. The travel market completely disappeared as flights were halted, and while the business could sustain themselves for a few months, it turned out COVID would last much longer. So how did they negotiate an Exit to Hopper, a travel company valued at $5B, during a pandemic? Listen to find out.

Sara didn’t know that answering an ad on Craigslist for a cannabis agency would result in her buying, building and eventually selling that same company.

This week on The Exit: Zeynep Ilgaz migrated from Turkey 25 years ago with two suitcases and $5K to her name and made the American dream a reality. Not coming from a biotech background, Zeynep never thought she would start a medical device company but she saw an opportunity in the home testing diagnostic market and jumped on it.

This week on The Exit: When Jason co-founded gaming start-up PopCap, never in his wildest dreams did he imagine exiting to EA for $650MM. The business started out as three guys creating games to sell back to the big gaming companies, but they quickly had to rethink that business model. The collapse of web games, combined with the dawn of Ecommerce in 2000, forced PopCap into selling their games online and business boomed. After 11 years, they decided to exit and found themselves at the center of a bidding war. Listen to find out why he believes the bidding war led to a successful exit for them. 

This week on The Exit: Scared by unceremoniously losing her job when the newspaper she was working at shut down, Kim vowed to start her own business so she would never need to rely on anyone else again. The result was a 16 year journey of building an Australia-wide event company. Always knowing she would […]

This week on The Exit: Cecilia Zywicki is a seasoned EdTech entrepreneur, fascinated by innovation around learning. Cecilia’s first business, Ranku, was planned out on the back of a napkin over martinis in San Francisco with a friend. Ranku was a two-sided marketplace for state university systems to increase student enrollment, and after finding their niche the business started to grow. How did A round financing conversations turn into an acquisition by John Wiley & Sons? Listen to find out.

This week on The Exit: The minute Dru left college he was on the hunt for an opportunity. His desperation took him to a dusty barn in Dallas with an old printing press and a contact written on a napkin for 49% of a business that at the time wasn’t operational. This was the beginning of Popular Ink, which grew to the number one print packaging business in the US, and was acquired by Morgan Stanley for a record multiple. Listen to learn how Dru built the business from nothing and exited to one of the biggest investment management companies.

This week on The Exit: Touraj wrote the book on successfully exiting a business. Quickly realizing his passion for creating products, after working at a VC firm which he describes as an on-the-job MBA, Touraj left to start his entrepreneur journey. Starting and selling multiple businesses, Touraj has experienced it all, from fire sale to successful exits, including selling Webs to Vistaprint for $117.5M. Listen to learn from Touraj’s challenges and successes. 

This week on The Exit: Scott had the elusive unicorn exit when he sold Workfront to Adobe for $1.5 billion. From teaching seminary, his career took a dramatic turn when he fell into marketing, before teaching himself to code in the very early days of the internet. He soon found himself frustrated with the administration of marketing, so Scott created Workfront, a project management software. Listen to find out how the business grew, eventually being acquired by Adobe in a 3 week negotiation.