In our case, Simple was at the end of its runway and desperately needed a buyer after our primary angel backed out. BBVA was there at literally the last second (as in, we may not have been able to make the next payroll). So yeah, it wasn't really about the founders wanting to cash out; they desperately wanted to keep the idea going.

Have the founders tried to find a buyer for Simple to pull it out of BBVA and save it from being shut down?

That was floated as an option, but it would complicate/delay BBVA's merger with PNC. Their entire whitelabel tech stack (Open Platform) is being shut down.

Backed out.. as in, Bancorp dumped you? I had the completely wrong idea about that, then.

Not Bancorp, a Silicon Valley VC.

What tricks should I, as a founder of a company, maximize the valuation of my startup at government acqusition time, which revolving-door ex-regulator consultant should I hire to make sure my i's are dotted and t's crossed on all of my applications (and how expensive are they), who in the bureaucracy should I make friends with to ensure the smoothest possible acquisition.

The obvious retort would be to mention the problems with state ownership/control of companies.

However maybe you have a model in mind that doesn’t result in control ending up in the hands of the government.

If so, I’m curious!

Government could buy it out and sell shares back to the public, sort of like an IPO, but with some conditions attached, so that it ensures the company remains independent for a specified number of years post IPO.

How would the price be determined?

Maybe that model doesn't work, but I wish there was some government oversight preventing huge companies from buying out small competitors just to shut them down entirely. Like Apple did with Dark Sky, Microsoft did with Wunderlist, and Twitter did with Vine. It's really unfortunate that we can't have much small tech.

It seems like that wouldn’t solve the problem, because it would take away some of the incentive to create small tech in the first place!

Dark Sky got shut down? It works for me, or do you mean something different?

Android app was pulled. API service stopped accepting new applicants. API is scheduled to shut down. (iOS app continues to be updated, but API/functionality maybe rolled into iOS in a future version.)

Or you could reduce the barriers required for companies to go public/IPO.

What has changed over the last 20 years in the US is how much more expensive / difficult it has been for a company to go public. A lot of that is a result in 'consumer protections' that came into place after the .com bust and the financial crisis, but as with every short sighted government regulation, it has unintended consequences.

This isn't necessary. All the government has to do is block these acquisitions or shutdowns on simple antitrust grounds.

That would reduce the expected net present value of startups to investors, making it harder for them to get investment money in the first place and probably reducing the number of successful startups, acquired or otherwise. It's not obvious that this would be a net improvement.

Great, now there's even less reason to do a startup and it's even better to just take a FAANG job.