This is the challenge with taking venture dollars, your interests aren't aligned. As a founder post Series B you probably have at least 10% of the business, th

This is the challenge with taking venture dollars, your interests aren't aligned. As a founder post Series B you probably have at least 10% of the business, that's a nice $400MM payout coming your way. But if the VC invested at a $1B price, picks up 10% and 80% of their return goes to their LPs they are personally pocketing much less. So it is advantageous for them to continue to shoot for the stars rather than sell short. Plus they have multiple bets going on at the same time while the founders only have one. So a $4B acquisition nets the founder $400MM, but and the VC firm is picking up $300MM of which 80% is going back to LPs, leaving $60MM for the partnership, perhaps split 3-7 ways, with maybe a kicker for the partner that sourced and led the investment. So let's say that's roughly $10MM going to the VC partner. Well you got one person staring at $400MM and another staring at $10MM. The interests aren't quite aligned. Also survivorship bias has us focused on companies that turned down acquisition offers and made it big, like Facebook, Google, Netflix, Snapchat, and so forth, but we don't really hear about the companies that turn down the offer and then fail to meet that acquisition price later, because that story just doesn't sell as well and the company fades into irrelevance so it isn't a piece that is picked up often. Certainly at the time it could have been a good decision given how new the market was and the potential upside, but obviously hindsight is 20/20.