First published in A Reasonable Rant: Private Edition (members-only subscription) on 15 June 2026.

What if the biggest factor determining whether investors ever get their money back has less to do with the company and more to do with where that company was built? Part One of The Exit Illusion exposed how poorly venture capital records the journey from ownership to realised returns. Part Two follows that question across borders, asking whether the infrastructure required to complete that journey exists in the first place.

Drawing on S² Intelligence Lab's analysis of more than 1,350 venture capital firms and 35,000 startups across ten regional datasets, Neo examines radically different exit systems across North America, Europe, China, South Korea, India, Africa, Latin America and beyond. India reveals what happens when liquidity mechanisms are deliberately constructed. South Korea shows how disclosure changes when exit accountability becomes part of institutional credibility. China demonstrates how liquidity can exist but remain sector-specific. Elsewhere, companies encounter a more fundamental problem: capital has been given increasingly sophisticated ways to enter, without equivalent infrastructure for it to leave.

Ultimately, The Exit Illusion becomes less a story about successful and unsuccessful startups than about incomplete ecosystems. Funding companies and creating somewhere for their ownership to go are two separate projects, yet much of the world has concentrated on only the first. If venture capital is supposed to recycle capital, perhaps the defining question for an ecosystem is no longer how much money it can attract, but whether it has actually built a credible way for that money to come back.