I would assume selling to Microsoft would be the thing to do.
But whoever buys it has no revenue model so that’s tricky. Unless they’re doing it for altruistic purposes.
Don’t get it twisted I love SO.
That would leave an eventual IPO as the only way out, but they'd need to break even first (or at least have a very compelling vision to break even soon). I don't see that happening with their current Teams product, which is an uncompelling entry in a crowded market.
Also, whether Teams eventually succeeds is largely unrelated to SO's unique value: the community. Teams is not valuable because of the community, it's just a spin-off from their public platform. They really need to find a better path to success, because wasting $85M on the status quo is not going to get them there. Their Careers product was more interesting in this respect, but it seems they failed to achieve sufficient scale there.
Half the smartest people in the world are working on the revenue model
Ads. Ads everywhere.