Q: When startup founders exit, how many start new companies?
It’s pretty common. Many founders learn they aren’t “done” after all after selling. Sometimes it takes some time to see that, and the gap between starting a new one in many cases is a year or longer. But many do it again, even after relatively large exits with live-changing economics.
Jyoti Bansal sold AppDynamics to Cisco for almost $4B. He ended up needing to do another one, and has already built Harness into a $1B+ startup. A second unicorn:
Auren Hoffman sold Liveramp for $310m, and then it IPO’d for $4B+. He wasn’t done and started Safegraph, already worth hundreds of millions:
Lew Cirne first founded Wily, an early leader in the APM / observability space, and sold it for $375,000,000. He took some time off, and realized he wasn’t done. He founded New Relic to do it again as SaaS. Today, New Relic is worth $4 Billion.
Rene Lacerte sold PayCycle to Intuit for $170m. But the journey wasn’t over. He did the same thing, just bigger, with Bill.com. Today, Bill is worth $12B:
The list could go on and on.
