This is a very investor-centric article. It assumes that successful founders will one day want to "hit it out of the park" by the investor's definition (moreso

This is a very investor-centric article. It assumes that successful founders will one day want to "hit it out of the park" by the investor's definition (moreso than they have with a $100M company), as if founders live to serve the interests of the investors. I'd suggest that founders who have a profitable $100M company get themselves free from the chain of their investors as quickly as possible and go about their lives running a successful company, never worrying about what investors think or want again. Remember which party is actually engaged in creating something valuable here. You might need their money to start, but if you do things right, you don't need it to live. The other caveat here is that sama says many founders are surprised when potential acquirers don't consider them "legitimately valuable". That's because founders typically think of value in technical terms. AFAIK, acquisitions happen only because you have something that the company can't just rip off: either you already have a large/significant installed base in a segment the company wants, a recognizable brand, or you have some intellectual property that the acquiring company couldn't recreate by stuffing 3-4 engineers in a closet for a year (which costs ~$1M, much cheaper than any type of exit you're hoping for) (this basically means patents that they want to own for themselves, not really patents on interesting technology, because such patents can normally be circumvented).