We sold the company I co-founded at the start of this year and left the day the deal closed. Seven months on feels like the right distance to write something honest about what that period was like — not the version that gets posted on the day, all gratitude and tidy full stops, but the texture underneath it. Some of it surprised me. Most of it, I suspect, would surprise anyone who hasn’t been through it, and would be quietly familiar to anyone who has.

I’m writing it down partly because almost nobody does. The exit is announced, congratulations are accepted, and then the person disappears into whatever comes next while the rest of us assume they’ve simply arrived somewhere and stopped. The reality is stranger and more interesting than that, and if you’re heading toward the same thing — mid-process now or just starting to imagine it — it might be worth knowing what the far side feels like. Feel is the important word.

The part nobody tells you about the process

Start before the close, because that’s where the real story begins.

A deal takes months. Sometimes years. Mine ran well over a year. For the whole of that stretch, you are running at an anxiety level that doesn’t really subside, because the thing you are hoping for is the kind of thing that changes your life, and it is not done until it is done. It doesn’t much matter how directly involved you are in the mechanics on any given day. The outcome sits over everything, and the outcome is binary, and it isn’t yours to control.

The closest analogy I have is buying a house, except the house is the thing you have spent years of your life building, and the chain can collapse at any point for reasons that have nothing to do with you. You learn to live with a particular kind of dread — not acute panic, but a low, constant hum that you carry into every meeting, every weekend, every attempt to think about anything else. You get good at functioning with it there. You almost forget it’s a temporary state.

And here is the thing about that anxiety: it is not proportional to the odds. Plenty of deals complete. But you are not living a probability — you are living the single outcome that reshapes your next decade or more, and the mind does not do statistics about things that matter that much.

The anticlimax, and why it lingers

Then it completes. And you do not wake up the next morning reset.

This really caught me out. I had assumed — without ever examining the assumption — that the day the deal closed, the weight would lift. It doesn’t work like that. The anxiety had been there for so long that it had become part of how I held everything together, and a system that has been running on that for months doesn’t switch off because the reason for it has gone. It winds down. Slowly. Over weeks and then months, not overnight.

For a while, you are carrying a readiness for a threat that no longer exists. The body and the mind keep scanning the horizon out of habit. You keep checking for emails. You keep expecting a call from the advisors. It’s a strange, hollow feeling — the opposite of the elation you were promised, and easy to mistake for something being wrong with you, when it’s just the cost of having cared that much for that long, finally being paid down.

I left at completion, so I felt this in its sharpest form — one day inside the thing, the next day outside it, nothing to redirect the readiness toward. If you stay on after a sale, the shape is different: the nerves don’t have to dissipate into empty space, because there’s a new phase waiting inside the same walls to absorb them. Neither is better. But the clean break has this peculiar feature, and it’s worth being ready for it rather than being blindsided by it.

The identity question

There’s well-worn advice that you exit, and then you get depressed. It’s worth handling honestly rather than either dramatising it or waving it away.

A company you found becomes part of who you are. You go all in, well past what any ordinary role would ask, for years — and that level of investment doesn’t sit in a separate compartment marked “work.” It becomes part of your sense of yourself. So when it’s gone, there’s a real question waiting that you may not have noticed you’d stopped asking: who am I, and what do I actually enjoy, when I’m not in the weeds of this one thing? For a while, meeting someone new and being asked “so what do you do?” was genuinely uncomfortable. I didn’t have an answer.

I’d frame it less as depression and more as recalibration — though I’d not be glib about the fact that for some people it is the heavier version, and that’s worth taking seriously. Either way it takes time, and the time is not wasted. It is the work of remembering that you existed before the company and will exist after it, and that the parts of you the company used were never the whole of you.

The question changes shape

Before a deal closes, you do think about what comes next. But — for me at least — that thinking is almost entirely practical: tax, structuring, what happens to the proceeds, the machinery of the new situation. Sensible, necessary, and oddly beside the point.

Because the question that mattered only arrived afterwards, and it was a different question. Not what do I do with this, but what do I want to spend my time doing now.

That question is harder than it sounds. The script most of us are handed runs in one direction: school, a job, climb the ranks, maybe start something, and eventually stop — retire. The apparent reward for an exit is that you get to skip to the end. You don’t need to work. And that sounds like the answer right up until you look at it properly, because the script only works if everyone runs it on roughly the same timetable. Stop in your thirties and you stop alone — everyone you know is still going. The reward reveals itself as isolation. My mum put it best when she and my dad sold their business: “What am I supposed to do, stay at home and make jam?”

So “you don’t have to do anything” is not the liberation it looks like. It just clears the board and hands the real question back to you, unanswered: not what you’re free from, but what you want to spend your time on.

For me the answer, when it came, was that I wanted to build again. Which then reframed everything else: the practical machinery — the advisors, the structuring, the management of all the new pieces — stopped being the point and became the means. The reason to get that scaffolding right was so that it would take the administration off my hands and free up the one thing I wanted to protect, which was the time and attention to build. Bringing the right people in around me wasn’t a luxury of the new situation; it was the precondition for doing the thing I’d decided I wanted to do.

Why going again feels different this time

There’s good advice that says take six months off after an exit. Stop, reset, don’t rush into the next thing. I think that’s right, and I’d recommend it to anyone who’s been through the same experience.

But I’d add something to it, because the moment you’re resetting into is not the same moment it would have been a few years ago. The cost of starting something has fallen sharply. You can now test an idea — see whether it has any life in it — without first committing to the whole apparatus of a launch: the funding rounds, the team, the runway, the irreversible bets. You can experiment your way toward something before you commit to it. Going again no longer has to be a cliff edge. It can be a gentle walk up to the edge, with plenty of chances to turn back before you’ve staked anything that matters.

And then there’s the part that I find genuinely interesting, because it’s about where the risk sits rather than how the work gets done.

The first time I built, I wanted to do it — that was never in question. But it also had to work. The downside was real and it was personal; there wasn’t a soft landing underneath. This time the wanting is exactly the same, but the stakes are not. The cost of being wrong is small now, in a way it simply wasn’t before. And it turns out that changes the whole character of the thing. When building has to work, every decision carries a weight that has nothing to do with the work itself. When it doesn’t have to — when you’re building because you want to and the downside is survivable — you build differently. More freely. More for the interest of the problem than the necessity of the outcome.

That, more than the proceeds, is what the exit actually bought: not the freedom to stop, but the freedom to build without the fear. It’s a better position to create from than the one I had the first time, and recognising that is most of what’s made the last seven months feel like a beginning rather than an end.

Summary

None of this is a complaint. I’m acutely aware of the position an exit puts you in, and I wouldn’t trade the challenges of this phase for any other. But “lucky” and “easy” are not the same word, and the gap between how an exit looks from outside and how it feels from inside is wide enough to be worth mapping for the next person.

So: it’s a strange and quiet period, the nerves take longer to leave than you expect, the identity question is real, and the most interesting work turns out to be figuring out what you want rather than what to do with what you’ve got. And on the far side of all that, if you’ve got the appetite for it, there’s a more forgiving and more interesting moment to start again than there has ever been.

A start line, not a finish line. Which is, on balance, a very good problem to have.