Two operators. Your startup. One unfiltered hour pressure-testing the path to exit. The numbers, the story, the buyer. Polished decks die at the door.
Every founder eventually sits across from someone who's about to write a very large cheque. Or walk away. That conversation is brutal, specific, and unforgiving. Exits & Chaos is a simulation of that room, run by two operators who've been on both sides of it. No softball questions. No founder-worship. Just one hour of finding out whether your business survives contact with reality.
Your last pitch. Fight or die.
Every episode runs the same gauntlet. The founder doesn't see the questions in advance. We do.
Cap table. Net retention. Real CAC vs. blended. Concentration risk. Quality of revenue. We pull on every thread until something doesn't hold.
The version you tell investors, the version you tell yourself, and the version that survives an acquirer's diligence. They're rarely the same. We find the gaps.
Comparable transactions. Realistic multiples. Who actually buys companies like yours, at what stage, at what number. And why your target is probably wrong.
We've built revenue engines, sat on the cap tables, and been in the rooms where the price gets argued line by line. The questions we ask are the questions someone is eventually going to ask you for real.
18+ years building B2B sales and GTM. Operator chair, not consultant chair. Has spent his career installing revenue engines inside European software companies that don't have time for slide decks. Bipolar, disclosed on the page on purpose: the highs sharpen pattern recognition, the lows kill small talk. Both serve the questions you'll hear on this show.
Serial founder. Multiple companies built across data and AI. Innovator before either word became a marketing line. Strategic operator and investor. Has been on the other side of most of the questions we ask, which is exactly why he asks them.
Three reasons. Pick whichever one matters most to you.
Before you face actual investors or acquirers. No hand-holding, no "great question." If your story can't survive us, it won't survive them.
An hour of strategic pressure on your model, the kind investors and acquirers will eventually apply. Then two weeks of content. Written teardown, episode clips, social-ready assets you can publish wherever you want.
Founders, M&A advisors, and the buyer-side crowd will be listening. Survive the hour and that's a credential no pitch deck can manufacture.
Applications are reviewed by Viktor & Patrick personally. We pick founders we believe will hold up, and benefit from, sixty minutes of public pressure. Roughly 50% of applicants make it on.
No. The whole point is that it's on the record. We agree off-the-record territory in pre-production. Specific customer names, exact contract values, anything legally sensitive. Everything else is fair game.
Founders contemplating an exit in the next 6–24 months, typically €1–20M ARR. Earlier is fine if the exit thesis is unusually clear. Pre-revenue is not a fit.
~60 minutes live, edited to ~45. Remote or in-person in Cologne.
You can. We don't recommend it. We're testing how you think, not how you've rehearsed.
Pre-revenue, allergic to hard questions, or here for free PR. We can spot all three from the application.
Exits & Chaos is not advertising inventory. It's a room where European operators, M&A advisors, and buy-side listeners come to watch businesses get pressure-tested before they're sold. Partnership here means association with that. Not an ad read between segments. We work with a deliberately short list of partners whose work sits adjacent to building, scaling, and transacting serious companies.
Name and logo on the show page and in episode notes. A single in-episode partner credit. For firms who want to be associated with the room.
Everything in Associate, plus a spoken partner segment and presence across the episode's distributed clips and written teardown. For firms who want to be visible to the buy-side audience, not just listed.
Everything in Partner, plus category exclusivity, involvement in episode framing where it fits naturally, and first refusal on future seasons. A standing seat, not a placement.
Partnerships are reviewed personally by Viktor & Patrick. We say no more than we say yes. The same way we pick founders.
Enquire about partnership →One email when we launch. No newsletter. No drip. We'll unsubscribe you ourselves if you ask twice.