Either from IPO, selling it back to Everlaw, selling to another investor, or selling directly on a site like Forge (I just made a posting).
My first job out of college was at Everlaw, a startup that helps paralegals read millions of documents to find evidence for court cases. I spent months procrastinating on labeling a few hundred icons, and instead did a ton of side features and refactors that I now think provided no value. I never spoke with a single user. I met with my manager, the CEO, once a month and he had no context on what I was working on probably because he was busy running the buisiness and managing the rest of the 20 engineers.
Meanwhile the guy next to me builds this amazing data vis graph all by himself. And the girl down the hall finishes her acessibility feature (heading heirarchy) in like 2 weeks. Both of them started around the same time as me.
Suddenly, pandemic! We go full remote. I'm working late and waking late. The one week I'm on call, some outage happens during work hours and I don't respond because I'm asleep. CEO calls me personally. He is furious. This customer is super important. I get put on a Performance Improvement Plan. I'm tasked with fixing the bug in our database code that caused the outage. I accidentally mutate prod when I think I'm on dev. Also the migration script I run is wrong and doesn't entirely fix the issue so I have to do it over again except now I have two issues to fix.
I end up being let go. Despite only being there 11 months they still let me exercise my stock options. I got 15,000 shares for around $5,000. Those shares are worth $110,000 as of 2021 series D. I want to sell.