Lecture 8 - Foundations of Venture Capital:
Exits and Distributions

Lecture 8 closes the series where the money finally comes back. Every earlier session — the asset class, the fund, the sector, construction, terms, diligence, and value creation — was building toward the liquidity event. This lecture explains how capital is returned to investors through mergers, acquisitions, and public offerings, how the distribution waterfall determines who receives what and in what order, and what can go wrong along the way.

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Because MedTech value is realized mostly through acquisition, the session presents a framework for understanding why strategic acquirers buy — organized as Eric's Seven C's of Corporate Development™: cost efficiencies, country expansion, customer acquisition, control of a strategic asset, capabilities, capacity, and channel expansion. A worked distribution example ties the fund-level metrics from Lecture 1 — DPI and TVPI — back to a concrete set of cash flows, so the vocabulary introduced at the start of the series resolves into real numbers at the end.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, a participant should be able to:

• Describe the main exit paths and how each returns capital.

• Explain the distribution waterfall and the order in which proceeds are paid.

• Understand why strategic acquirers buy, using the Seven C's framework.

• Connect a set of exit proceeds back to DPI and TVPI.

• Recognize what can go wrong on the path to an exit.