> One of my earlier startups had multiple acquisition offers which would have made all the shareholder employees quite happy, but since the offers wouldn't have

> One of my earlier startups had multiple acquisition offers which would have made all the shareholder employees quite happy, but since the offers wouldn't have moved the wealth needle of the already wealthy founders by an order of magnitude, they turned them all down. This is distressingly common, and not just in the valley. I've seen numerous film deals fall apart because the producer didn't want to take a 10-30% discount on their standard fee (we're talking in the realm of a $150k discount on a personal take of 500k-1.5m on a deal), films that otherwise would've actually been made ended up falling apart because someone wanted to extract just that much more value. Kinda like overplaying the market, really.