Ask HN: Founder liquidity options after leaving company?
Hey HN, I wanted to see if perhaps this community would be able to help me get some clarity on how to think about the next few years of my life with respect to my company.<p>I&#x27;ve been working at the startup I founded for about five years and we&#x27;re doing fairly well: revenue keeps going up, the teams&#x27;s growing, raising further rounds shouldn&#x27;t be too hard if necessary, not a unicorn but the metrics for our age are great. I&#x27;m however tired of the job itself, the crazy hours, the people and the location. I&#x27;d love to be able to go do something else with my life before I&#x27;m much older.<p>Truth is I could be with the company for the next 10-20 years, but I&#x27;m already not particularly passionate about the mission, the industry, or the job itself. I&#x27;m pretty darn good at it, and if I stayed I&#x27;d keep getting the company to bigger milestones, but I&#x27;d rather do something else. If I were to leave, I believe the company is at this point large enough and diversified enough that it would do just fine without me.<p>What options do I have in terms of trading my fully vested equity for the FU money pot of gold? At the end of the day I&#x27;d be happy to live a very modest life somewhere boring and have 100% ownership of my time. I can try to talk to our investors without the other founders knowing, see if I can strike a deal with them, but it&#x27;s likely I&#x27;d get gouged. I don&#x27;t think I can talk to the other founders about it because it&#x27;d make it look like I&#x27;m not committed to the mission much before I have an exit plan.<p>Has anybody here gone through the process? What did you do? What did you learn? Thank you.