The exit is the product
In a company optimised for the exit, the software is not really the point. It is a means to a liquidity event — raise, grow the numbers that make the story, get acquired or wind down. Every decision bends toward that horizon: features chosen to impress an acquirer, growth pursued past the point of usefulness, corners cut on the boring durable things because durability does not show up in a deal.
None of this is villainy. It is the incentive doing exactly what it was built to do. But it means the product and the person using it are on borrowed time from the start. The company is not trying to be there in ten years; it is trying to be bought before then, and the software is the inventory it hopes to sell.
Who pays when the deal closes
When the exit finally arrives, the bill lands somewhere, and it does not land on the people who cashed out. It lands on the users. The app is sunset with ninety days' notice. The data is migrated into something no one asked for, or simply switched off. The roadmap you were promised belonged to a company that no longer exists in the form that promised it.
This is what it means to be treated as collateral — not attacked, just spent. The users were never the point; they were the asset being groomed for sale, and once the sale clears their interests have no further claim on anyone. The cruelty of it is how ordinary it is. It happens to good products, built by decent people, inside a machine that was pointed at the exit the whole time.
A company that has nowhere to exit to
The alternative is not to be nobler. It is to be built differently, so the incentive points somewhere else. A company with no board demanding a return, no quarterly targets, no investors waiting for the sale, is a company that has nowhere in particular to exit to — and so the only way it wins is by keeping its products running and its users well served, year after year.
That is the structure underneath everything we make. Not a promise to be good in a system that rewards selling out, but a shape that makes selling out beside the point. The long view is not willpower. It is the absence of the pressure that makes short-termism rational — and once that pressure is gone, patience stops being a virtue and becomes the obvious thing to do.