Stacey Higginbotham takes a look at today’s VC exit environment. She cites an interesting fact, the median age of companies being sold is about 7 years. It’s useful to keep this in mind when building a company. For all of my time in startups we talk about a “twelve to eighteen month horizon” — which manages to stay at a constant distance with each passing year ;). Looking around at the data, with few exceptions it seems to take five or more years to build a solid profitable enterprise.