Jerome Myers Releases Exit Expedition Working Paper
New Theory Examines Why Successful Business Exits Can Still Leave Founders Unprepared
Founder Observatory founder Jerome Myers has released a new conceptual working paper examining what happens when a liquidity event expands a founder’s financial resources while removing the role, routines, relationships, and sources of significance that previously organized the founder’s life.
“The Exit Expedition: A Temporal Theory of Founder Role Exit, Resource Reconfiguration, and Post Liquidity Decision Risk” is now available on SSRN.
Most exit planning is designed to prepare the company for closing. The new paper asks a different question:
What happens when the business is ready for the founder to leave, but the founder has not yet replaced what the business provided?
The paper introduces the Depletion Window, a theoretical period in which resources embedded in the founder role have declined but their replacements have not stabilized. It also presents Timing Discipline as a mechanism for reducing premature, irreversible, and identity replacement commitments during the period surrounding an exit.
“The transaction determines what the founder receives,” Myers said. “The descent reveals whether the founder was prepared to live with what the transaction changed.”
The working paper integrates scholarship concerning entrepreneurial exit, identity theory, role transitions, resource conservation, retirement adjustment, recovery, meaning of work, and decision making. It develops 10 propositions for future empirical testing.
The Founder Observatory records informing the theory are used as practice based construct discovery evidence. They are not presented as a representative dataset, national prevalence estimate, or source of causal conclusions.
