It is absolutely not 'non founder friendly' for a VC to go after their 'participating' value especially when there is actually money on the table. There would

It is absolutely not 'non founder friendly' for a VC to go after their 'participating' value especially when there is actually money on the table. There would be zero negative PR fallout from that. This founder basically ripped off his investors, it's completely unethical - and he'll never get a dime of VC money again. If VC firms didn't care about getting their 1x money out then the terms wouldn't be there in the first place. It's normal to do that, and a $500M firm returning 10% a year takes 20% of that, so 2% which is not really a huge amount of money for a team of people.