An acquisition can be regarded as a growth strategy, but the sale of a company leads to a halt in growth. Such a sale does not necessarily have to be described as a loss, however. On the contrary, a trade sale—when a start-up sells itself to another firm—can be seen as the successful end of the entrepreneurial process. A firm has the possibility of continuing to grow as part of another firm, or the founders can use the sales revenue to pursue other activities. There are many examples of so-called “serial entrepreneurs”. These entrepreneurs have founded several new companies, helped them to grow, and then sold them in order to pursue other activities. The best example of this is Jim Clark from Silicon Valley. He is currently working on starting his fourth and fifth companies, both in the Internet field. Prior to this he generated several billion USD for himself and his colleagues with three very successful high-tech start-ups: Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healthion. Clark recognized a long time ago that he is best at controlling the growth phase of a start-up, but is too impatient to manage a mature organization professionally. He tries to choose the right time to sell new firms to competitors which are better at dealing with the maturity phase (cf. Chong et al. 2000).
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