An important aspect of venture capital investing is the exit strategies. Venture capital funds primarily invest with an exit in mind after a few years. After successfully funding at seed, pre-production, production and expansion stages, a venture capitalist will start assessing exit strategies. The exit in the form of disinvestment or liquidation is the last and final stage of the venture capital funding. The key types of liquidation/disinvestment are trade sales, sale of quoted equity post initial public offering (IPO), and write-offs. Let’s look at each of these in detail:

Trade Sales: In this type of strategy the private company is sold or merged with an acquirer for stocks, cash, or a combination of both.

IPO: If the company has done well, the venture capital investors will take the IPO route, by issuing shares registered for public offering. An example is the upcoming Facebook IPO, which is expecting to raise about $15 billion through IPO and is valued at approx. 100 billion. The venture capital investors and other private investors will get their portion of shares who can put them in the open marketplace for trading after an initial lock-in period.

Write-offs: These are voluntary liquidations that may or may not result in any proceeds.

Apart from the above three types of disinvestment, there are a few other options:

Bankruptcy: The company may just go bankrupt.

Buy-back: In this method the entrepreneur buys-back the investment share from the venture capitalists and takes it back to being a privately held company.

Investors who invest in a venture capital fund get distributions of public stock or cash from realized venture capital investments. Sometimes the fund may require further investments from limited partners. At other times, they may make cash or share distributions at random times during the lifetime of the fund. Investors can sell their interests to another buyer if they find one.

In a bad case scenario, some funds find themselves with highly illiquid, barely there companies. In a good scenario, they have good investments, which they disinvest from at a stage and find new investments to fund.