2 resources from Heavybit we point founders to, and the questions each answers.
✍️ Essay
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Why we picked it
The clearest argument for why you, personally, should be the one doing early outreach and sales, which is exactly why using your own name and email for cold outreach makes sense at the start. It reframes selling as pattern-matching and discovery (the same muscle you already use to debug a product), so a technical founder stops treating it as someone else's job. Treat it as a starting point for the mindset behind personal outreach, then borrow the tactics that fit your market.
No one can speak to your product with more credibility than you, which is the whole case for reaching out under your own name rather than hiding behind a company inbox.
Early sales is discovery, not charm: the 3Ws (why buy anything, why buy us, why buy now) work like a debugging process of asking, listening, and testing.
Doing it yourself first is what lets you hire and manage a sales team later instead of handing off a process you never actually understood.
Why we picked it
This is the clearest breakdown of where the money and the IP actually go in an asset sale versus a wind-down, so you can see who wins in each path before you pick one. It shows how consideration splits between the company (which flows through the cap table to investors) and the team (retention packages that do not touch investors), and it walks named deals (Inflection returning investors 1 to 1.5x, Windsurf's team-and-license structure) so the abstract becomes concrete. Critically, it flags the trap: if too much value is routed to the team around a 1x liquidation preference, investors can allege you diverted value, so a soft landing done carelessly can end worse than a straight shutdown.
Deal value splits into company consideration (goes to investors via the cap table) and team retention (does not); the split decides who actually recovers anything
A 1x liquidation preference means investors get paid first, so a small headline price with big team packages can leave them with a token sum and a lawyer's letter
IP moves as an asset sale or a non-exclusive license; how you assign or license it is what a buyer is really paying for, so keep it clean and unencumbered
