When to sell your startup, and who actually gets paid (with Sebastien Stanley-Jones) | Ep. 36

Airtable sold to Bending Spoons. The founders walked away ultra-high-net-worth, and the employees who gave the company three, five, or ten years walked away holding something worth zero.ㅤDaniel Kazani, co-founder of Softup, sits down with Sebastien Stanley-Jones of Flippa, the world's largest M&A marketplace for digital assets. Around 15,000 transactions a year run through that marketplace, and Sebastien thinks most founders are missing the same thing. They know how to build. They have no idea what their exit ramps look like.ㅤThe conversation covers what makes a business genuinely sellable, why the preference stack decides who actually gets paid, and why fundraising is like walking through a desert. Sebastien gets spicy on VCs, explains why a business built in a weekend with no defensibility sells for a fraction of revenue, and lays out what he would look at with 500K to spend on an online business.ㅤ👤 Guest BioㅤSebastien Stanley-Jones leads global strategic M&A for EMEA at Flippa, where founders sell SaaS, e-commerce, content, apps, and domains into a global buyer network. He is Canadian, based in Amsterdam, and his career runs through investment banking, private equity corporate development, and fintech: managing director at Two Roads Advisors, global business development at Accel Club, corporate development at Moonshot Brands, and head of enterprise at Clearco in Toronto. He also mentors founders through Plug and Play.ㅤ📌 What We CoverㅤWhat Flippa requires before its brokers will push an asset to the buyer network: two years of monthly financials, taxes in good standing, and an API call into Stripe, Adyen, or SumUp to confirm the revenue is the revenueWhy the Airtable sale is a preference stack story, and why the employees absorb the loss while the founders and most of the VCs do notSebastien's own version of it at Clearco, scaled fast to multi-million status, options now worth zeroFundraising as walking through a desert: fill the canteen when you find water, go one and done, and stay the person dictating the next terms instead of taking the priceWhy he thinks most VCs are not very good, and what daily mark to market has to do with judgmentThe three-part test for whether to sell: are you having fun, do you have line of sight on growth, are you making money. On the way up you have control. On the way down you are a passengerDefensibility as the only question that matters for AI-built businesses, and why how you built it is irrelevant if the revenue is durableThe 500K playbook: entry price first, the SaaS apocalypse is overblown, e-commerce hard assets are cheap, and key-person risk gets solved with SOPs and deferred payments that keep the seller answering the phoneㅤ🔗 Resources MentionedㅤFlippaAirtable, Bending Spoons, Meetup, komootConstellation SoftwareClearcoStripe, Adyen, SumUp, ShopifyWayflyer, 8figAtlassianLovable, Claude, CursorPlug and PlayAndreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Craft VenturesSebastien Stanley-Jones on LinkedIn