Introduction I founded two companies — zynamics, which I ran from 2004 to March 2011 and which I sold to Google (GOOG), and optimyze, which I ran from 2019 to November 2021 and sold to Elastic (ESTC). The first company was bootstrapped, initially with no cofounder (an early employee received a big equity stake later), the second company had a cofounder and was venture-backed. Neither of these exits were “successes” by Silicon Valley standards, but they were definitely impactful and possibly...