Last week I met with a number of companies at EdTech Week, shortly after completing the sale of Teachally to McGraw Hill, and the conversations reminded me how different the process looks from the founder’s side of the table than from the banker’s side. I spent ten years advising software founders on exits, so I thought I understood the process well. Going through it myself, as both founder and advisor on the same deal, showed me how much I had gotten used to seeing it from a distance.
Bankers tend to see a deal as a sequence of workstreams, including the buyer outreach, the diligence requests, the purchase agreement, and the integration planning. Each of those is a manageable task when you watch it from the outside. A founder reacts to every one of them differently, because each step touches something they built over many years, and they take each decision more personally than an advisor usually expects. A diligence question reads as a judgment on the company, a pricing discussion reads as a judgment on the work, and an integration plan raises real questions about the team they brought along.
This was my second exit, since I also sold Sandlot Games earlier in my career, and the second time still taught me something the first had not. I once again know what it feels like to wait for an answer on a term sheet or to read a draft agreement late at night. Every exit changes the founder’s life, and each step along the way deserves care from the advisor, who should explain what is happening and why, as well as what comes next.
At Hemisphere, we want every founder we work with to feel that we understand their position, because we have held it ourselves. A transaction closes on a signing date, but for the founder it also represents years of effort, risk, and hope for the people who built the company with them. Advisors who keep that in mind give better advice, communicate more thoughtfully, and run a process that founders can trust from the first call through closing.