It used to be you basically had two options to make money as a founder:

* hope for an IPO many years down the road.
* Or maybe get acquired by a handful of BigCos.

Today, startups have so many more options for founder liquidity:

#1. Secondary liquidity in any hot A-B-C-D+ round

Secondary liquidity is now commonplace in any hot round with a Big Fund in it.

This means you can make at least a million or two dollars in just a few years if you build something meaningful, without selling your company

#2. Acquisition by a competitor

This used to be a bummer, but with 400+ unicorns today and so many decacorns, your competitor can now buy you for hundreds of millions or more down the road

This often makes sense to consolidate #1 position in market

#3. Sale to PE firm

Every week, PE firms buy up another SaaS company from $10m-$1000m in ARR. Some are public like Pluralsight, Realpage, etc. but most are private.

Gainsight and Pipedrive were just bought for $1B+ by PE in the past few weeks. Many others too

In short, there are 10x more ways to make meaningful money as a founder than 5+ years ago

Yes, there are also 10x more great SaaS start-ups

But put your head down, get to $10m ARR growing 100% YoY, slug it out, and build something great

The money really will come if you do

IPO + M&A by Google/MSFT/FB/SFDC etc. not necessarily required anymore to make real $$$

So just go for it

A related post here: https://www.saastr.com/every-with-just-pretty-good-growth-you-can-build-a-unicorn-after-10m-arr/