Redo your math

First, you’ll have to figure out if your investors are willing to sell back their stake to you— and at what price. Good news: You might not have to pay them as much as you think. “You have to stop thinking about venture math” and the headline-grabbing valuations that VCs like to brag about, says Bryce Roberts, founder of alternative-investment fund Indie.vc. Instead, research the financial terms of recent M&A deals in your industry.

Gascoigne had warned prospective Series A investors that he might not want to take his company public or sell it. So one of his investors, Collaborative Fund, asked for a clause to allow it to get its money back at 9 percent annual interest beginning five years after the investment. That became a starting point for negotiations. “I felt comfortable pushing for that, because it had been agreed to as an alternative we’d already set down,” says Gascoigne. In the end, the Series A investors got a 40.5 percent return on their three-and-ahalf-year investment.