When a company won’t be a breakout — but still has real assets, technology, or talent — how do you recover value instead of walking away empty? In this live session, we’ll go deep on the rarely discussed side of venture: extracting value from stragglers, acqui-hires, asset sales, and strategic shutdowns.
This is not a victory-lap conversation. It’s a practical, candid discussion about how to:
Initiate buyer conversations when time is against you
Turn a shutdown into an acqui-hire, asset sale, or IP deal
Protect founder reputation and relationships through the process
Avoid the most common mistakes founders make in final innings
Founders, investors, and operators will walk away with a clearer sense of what’s still possible when growth stalls — and what to do before the lights go out.
Featuring:
Brendan Mahony, Founder of Sunset
Brendan Mahony is the founder and CEO of Sunset, helping VC-backed startups shut down by handling the legal, tax, and operational work. A Y Combinator alum and two-time founder, he sold his first company and later had to close his second. That experience shaped Sunset’s empathetic, execution-focused approach, which has guided hundreds of startups through orderly dissolutions and returned over $200 million to investors.
Melissa Marks, Partner at Gunderson Dettmer
Melissa Marks is a corporate partner in Gunderson Dettmer’s New York office. She represents technology companies in a variety of fields including consumer products and services, software and SaaS, artificial intelligence, healthtech, online media & social technologies, hardware, and climate tech & clean technologies, and also advises venture capital funds investing in those businesses. She is experienced in transactions at all stages of the innovation lifecycle, regularly advising entrepreneurs as they form businesses, counseling growing companies and investors through rounds of financing, structuring tender offers, M&A deals, public offerings and other late-stage transactions, and providing day-to-day guidance on corporate governance, employment, and intellectual property matters.
Sam Cates, Founder and Partner of Positive Sum
Sam Cates is cofounder and partner at Positive Sum, a venture firm backing founders pursuing their life’s work. Positive Sum has raised more than $300M across its first two funds and invests across stages and sectors, with a 30+ company portfolio that includes Vanta, Eight Sleep, Passthrough, and Tegus. Earlier, Sam spent six years at GE Ventures investing in the software and data that modernize the industrial world.
This is event is hosted by nextNYC. To learn more about nextNYC and/or sign up for their newsletter, visit http://next.nyc