NY Tech Week 2026 Recap — Exette
There is a specific kind of energy that happens when you put founders and fintech people in the same room and give them permission to talk about the thing nobody usually talks about.
That’s what happened at She’s Selling.
Fifty people showed up to a conversation about female exits at NY Tech Week. And what surprised me most was not how many questions they had. It was how ready they were to ask them.
The conversation
I got to do something at this event I don’t always get to do on stage: tell my own story. The actual one. Not the polished version that ends with a successful acquisition and a neat bow. The one that includes the moment I realized I had built something I was ready to leave, and the long, disorienting road between that realization and the transaction that actually released me.
I also got to share how Baton was part of that journey for me. Dylan Ganz, co-founder of Baton, joined me on stage, and what made that conversation land was that he didn’t just talk about what Baton does. He walked us through what the seller experience actually looks like. What to expect. Where people get stuck. What the process feels like from the inside, not just from a term sheet.
That kind of transparency is rare. The room felt it.
What the room wanted
The questions that came from the audience were tactical in the best way. Not “should I exit?” but “how do I start building toward one?” Not “is this possible?” but “what does the timeline actually look like?”
The energy in that room was not anxious. It was optimistic. It was people who had been carrying a private question: what if I could actually do this, and suddenly found themselves in a room full of other people who were carrying the same one.
That’s what happens when you normalize the conversation. Possibility shows up.
The statistic that stopped the room
There was one moment that shifted the energy from optimistic to urgent. Dylan shared a finding from McKinsey: that 92% of baby boomer business owners will not sell their business. Not because they don’t want to. But because they don’t know where to start or how to do it.
92%.
That number is not a business problem. It is a human one. It is what happens when an entire generation of people who built something significant never gets the infrastructure, the language, or the permission to leave it well.
That’s the gap Exette exists to close. And standing in a room of 50 people who felt that number in their chest, that’s what this week was for.
What’s next
She’s Selling was one conversation. Exette is building the infrastructure for all the ones that follow. If you were in the room and you’re ready to go deeper — or if you weren’t in the room but you’re asking the same questions — the community is open.
Come find out where you are in this.
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