Is Entrepreneurship All About The Exit?

If you spend time in the Silicon Valley culture, and that culture, today, is being exported very aggressively around the world, you would be easily convinced that entrepreneurship means financing and exit. I have never believed in this point of view. At a recent roundtable, I invited Christian Blume, CEO of Cleverbridge, an online payments company based in Germany that does about $40 million in self-financed, bootstrapped revenue, to kick the topic around. Please listen to the conversation, and weigh in with your thoughts …

To kick off the discussion, I will point you to Girish Navani, Founder and CEO of eClinicalworks, who absolutely doesn’t want to exit his over $300 million a year revenue private company. Girish loves what he is doing: transforming healthcare IT. He wants to keep doing just that.

Sridhar Vembu of Zoho is also running a private $300 million a year company that he doesn’t want to take public or sell.

Same with Ratmir Timashev of Veeam. Ratmir runs a $300 million a year company that he thinks can get to a billion dollars in revenue by 2018. No interest in an exit.

Of course, typically, if you have venture capital or private equity in your business, you will be compelled to exit because that’s what your investors have signed up for. In very rare cases, VC and PE investors may be up for being compensated in dividends. Ratmir has convinced his VC Insight Ventures to accept dividend compensation. It is, however, a very rare scenario.

So, please share with us your perspective.