This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Exits are back: what the record quarter really means for your next round
For the past three years, "exit" has been the word UK founders learned to say quietly. IPO windows were shut. M&A mostly meant selling at prices nobody put in a press release. And every DeepTech founder came to dread the question that surfaces in the earliest commercial conversations - who, exactly, is ever going to buy this?
Then came the second quarter of 2026. 32 companies went public at valuations above $1 billion. Twenty-four more were acquired at or above $1 billion, worth a combined $113 billion, the highest quarterly total on record. SpaceX delivered the largest venture-backed IPO in history, listing at $1.77 trillion and raising $75 billion.
These are global figures, per Crunchbase, dominated by American exchanges. And one company distorts them badly: strip out SpaceX and the record loses much of its shine. Not everyone got out. But the window, unmistakably, reopened.
So, should you care? You are raising a Seed round in Cambridge or a Series A in Bristol. Nothing about a trillion-dollar rocket listing changes your term sheet.
Except it does. Here is the thing to understand about an exit window: it moves at two speeds. Belief travels at the speed of a headline. Cash travels on a ten-year clock. The two look identical from a distance and confusing them is one of the more expensive mistakes a founder can make this year. The first will change how investors talk to you within weeks. The second determines whether they can actually write the cheque...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- The founder's dilemma: American capital, British sovereignty, and the structure in between
Last week we laid out the trap. If you build in dual-use frontier technology and expand into the United States, you are not making one decision but three, governed by the national-security machinery of two governments pulling in opposite directions.
The first is a question of US ownership: how much control of your company you must hand to Washington to sell to it. The second is a question of UK call-in: whether your own government will let the deal proceed. The third is a question of export control: once your product turns partly American, who you are still allowed to sell it to.
We promised a harder question this week. If you want to sell to both the UK and US governments, and raise the late-stage US capital to do it, how do you build so that no single decision quietly forecloses the others?
The honest answer is that no single solution works in every case. The right structure for a Series A company with the UK Ministry of Defence as its first customer is not the right structure for a Series B company with a signed US government contract and a US lead investor. The variables are too many and they shift over time. What we offer instead, drawn from years of guiding founders through these decisions, is a simple framework that produces your answer rather than a generic one, and holds up as circumstances change.
The framework comprises three lenses and two dials. Whenever one of these decisions lands in front of you, examine it through three lenses in turn: what your end customers demand of your structure, what your investors will require in return for their cheque, and what the tax and legal position can actually bear. Then turn two dials: your stage, because an early-growth company still holds options a late-stage one has traded away, and your sector, because a purely commercial DeepTech business with no defence or dual-use dimension escapes almost all of this.
We will apply the framework to the three pressure points we identified last week, in turn...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Going American has a price, and it is not equity
Last September, in The Great Transatlantic Divergence, we gave UK founders with global ambition an uncomfortable piece of advice: stop waiting for Europe to fix itself - and think American from day one. Incorporate in Delaware, hire US executives, raise from investors that can actually fund your growth. For most frontier founders, that still holds.
But there is a category where it comes with a complication we did not spell out then. If you build in dual-use technology, in AI, quantum, space, or advanced semiconductors, and you decide to expand into the United States, you are not making one decision. You are making three at once, and only one of them feels like a business choice. The other two are governed by the national-security machinery of two separate governments, pulling in opposite directions.
The founders who get hurt are not the ones who say no to America. They are the ones who say yes without noticing how many doors that single yes opens, and how few of them open back the other way.
This is the first of a two-part series. This week, the trap: the three regimes that close around a single decision. Next week, the smart structure: how to build so that selling to both governments, and raising the capital to do it, does not quietly foreclose your options...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Founders leading under fire: bringing the board bad news
Picture the board meeting before it happens. Revenue has stalled, a key hire has walked, or a critical development programme has slipped a quarter - and the next board meeting is three weeks away. The instinct of most founders is to wait, to use those three weeks to assemble a fuller picture, a tidier story, a problem that arrives already half-solved. It feels like the responsible thing to do.
It is almost always the wrong thing to do. The board is not primarily assessing the setback. It is assessing how you carry it. Directors expect things to go wrong, because things always go wrong, and a founder who never brings them a problem is not reassuring, they are unreadable. What the directors are gauging, in the days and weeks around bad news, is something simpler and harder to fake: whether a founder under pressure stays open and legible to them, or goes quiet and opaque exactly when they most need to see in.
This is the third and final briefing in our series on operating the early-stage board. The first two were about leading the regular meeting and reading each director in turn. This one is the hardest application of the same principle, because it asks you to lead the room at the precise moment your authority feels least secure...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Your board re-forms at every round. Learn to read it fast
Last week, we ended on a warning: the board you are managing today is not the board you will face in eighteen months. It changes shape beneath you, round by round, as each new investor-director arrives with an agenda of their own.
The shifts are marked. After a Seed round, the board might be the two co-founders and a single investor. After Series A, the founders, two investor-directors and an independent non-executive may form the new quorum. Each major round brings a new lead, and the new lead takes a seat.
That changing structure does changing work. At each stage the board is, or should be, optimised for a different job: early boards, through Seed and Series A, exist mainly to help find and exploit the early market; later boards turn to growth and company-building of a more classical kind, the shift in emphasis we traced in May. Neither is the better board.
The harder truth sits beneath the structure. Each director at the table has their own agenda. They may all carry the same legal duty to the company, but underneath is a private set of priorities that is theirs alone. Reading those priorities, director by director, is the real work of operating a board well...
This week on the startup to scaleup journey:
- Founders, your board doesn't want what it says it wants
Ask most founders what their board wants from a meeting and they will point at the board pack: the metrics, the financials, the update against plan. They are not wrong, exactly. But they are answering the stated question, not the real one. Behind every set of numbers, your directors are running a quieter assessment, and it has almost nothing to do with the slides.
The real question in the room is simpler and far more consequential: does this founder have a grip? Are they ahead of the business or behind it? When something breaks, will they see it first, or will the board? That assessment is being made whether you manage it or not, because the board holds the one power that matters most. It can judge and replace the chief executive. Shikhar Ghosh, the Harvard Business School professor and serial founder, is blunt about what this means: your board meetings are a continuous evaluation of you, dressed up as a review of the company.
So the founders who operate their boards well are not the ones with the most polished decks. They are the ones who understand what is actually being assessed, and who lead the room accordingly.
This is the first of three briefings on making your board work for you rather than against you. We start where it matters most: not with structure or composition, but with the unglamorous business of being seen to be in control...
