Sloan: Companies should purge the word 'exit' from their vocabulary
Steve Sloan · Demystifying the Unicorn Buzz with the CEOs of Calendly, Algolia, and Contentful · Nov 10, 2021 · at 37:34
Contentful CEO Steve Sloan discusses company longevity and reframing IPOs during a SaaStr panel on scaling unicorn SaaS companies.
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“Try and purge from everybody at your company's vocabulary the phrase exit, or the word exit. It's not an exit. It's the starting point. There might be some people who aren't in your company, some investors who need a liquidity event, or they need to leave. They're gonna go off and recycle. But this word of exit, I find it really strange, because everyone here, we're all builders. We build stuff for a living. We're not trying to exit. In a perfect world, we get to build stuff for decades. And so I find that word to be really, really corrosive in terms of getting everybody to think about the long term, to Bernie's point, how we invest in a wise way and in a disciplined way, because if you're thinking about the exit, which is, you know, 12 months or 24 months or 36 months out, you do build your business differently than if you think we want to be here for five, 10, 20 years.”
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