This attitude is exactly what pg is warning against. Corp Dev wants to wave a million dollars in your face and say "Isn't this a lot of money? It's more than yo

This attitude is exactly what pg is warning against. Corp Dev wants to wave a million dollars in your face and say "Isn't this a lot of money? It's more than you've ever had and probably more than you ever really thought you'd have. Just sign here and we'll make all of your problems go away." That's how smart people spend one million dollars to buy a company that will soon be worth one billion dollars. As pg said in the essay, the company making the offer got big enough to be an acquirer by resisting the urge to sell before they could achieve their full potential. They would like nothing more than to profit from others who lack the fortitude to do the same thing. Because the acquiring founders have been in those same shoes themselves, they know how appealing a million dollars can sound to a weary entrepreneur and they know what buttons to push. Do not give them what they want! The numbers in your example are made up, and they can never really be known with certainty. The trajectory of a startup can change with one phone call. There's no way to know whether it's really a 10% chance at a $1MM or a 3% chance at $2.3B or a 7.8% chance at $10MM at any given point in time. When so much is in doubt, it probably makes sense to err on the side of a belief in yourself and what you honestly feel that you can accomplish. Don't sell yourself short just because there's money on the table. That's what I took away from this well written and insightful essay, at least. And finally, this whole idea of "paul graham is trying to use his essays to manipulate founders into decisions that will benefit him financially" is silly and needs to stop. It's good to question the source, and to understand the motivations of those who give advice. But if there's anyone who has rightly earned a reputation for genuinely helping startup founders and generally doing the right thing, it's pg. He just doesn't want to see good people make the wrong decisions.