Ask HN: About exit strategies and paydays.

HN has been a mentor for me.(Sometimes I see it as a giant organism with a power of a thousand brain connected with no concurrency and poor integration algorithms.) I taught me many things, shaped me as I had my years of transformation from a naive boy to an ambitious confident but still a little naive boy. I never try to point out fallacies in the HN community, the chief reasons being that most of the times if will not get fixed. But something has been bothering me for quite a while.

I want to go into education sector (my ultimate goal being having my own university where I can fix things as I see fit). Thus whenever I think of a business, I think of something which will last at least a decade (after that it may lose relevance). But the start ups I see on HN are increasingly about making something to sell. Not just sell the product to the customers, but selling the company itself to some other bigger company. They are more concerned with having a big payday rather than making businesses that last.

So I ask HN, is having an exit strategy before even starting to make revenue.