Am I the only one that would love that situation to be able to start a new thing on easy mode? You know a lot of the failures, you now have a massive network, you have a big wad of cash.

Bust out the idea bin and make something else!

Having a lot of cash is not a good position to start a new product (your pivots will most likely be delayed due to that)

I would not mind facing the arduous challenges of having a lot of cash.

Ok fair enough I'd also definitely have to pass on dealing with that to an accountant but I more mean being able to work on it full time with no financial concern than chucking a milly after each idea

Also to clarify on the seeming heartless I sort of see things as being diluted when others work on them -- in a good way! -- for each person that adds to your thing it goes from mine to our. Long enough and big enough and it's more other people's creativity than yours. Your baby is all grown up and ready to do it's own thing

In the same vein as "you can't go home again" (you can go back to the physical location, but you have changed, anybody living there has changed, the buildings have changed etc, to the extent that it's no longer the same thing as your internal conception of "home").. "you can't start from scratch again".

As a founder who has made a lot of money, I can tell you that founders nearly never put in the same effort that they did into starting their company into something new. Elon Musk is the exception that proves the rule.

Our finance-based culture is very destructive to good companies. Whenever a founder sells a company and leaves, the company almost always goes steeply downhill.

It's a hell of a lot better than seeing something you created get destroyed and not having the extra zeros in your life. That's the result for most people.

Yeah, they got well compensated as mentioned but if it's something you've put a lot of love and hard work into and you're still burning for, I don't think money can truly compensate.

Obviously it can compensate since they signed something that stipulated it would compensate:

> and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control.

During the deal, self-rationalization starts to kick-in. The founders probably start believing some of the big-company synergy stories: complementary customer base, already scaled resources, complementary product in the portfolio. "Cross-sale alone will pay for the deal in X months/years." Sometimes they do work out! But all too often, the inertia of the larger business prevents realizing that dream. Yet if the founders weren't good at producing a reality distortion bubble, they quite likely wouldn't have made it to the M&A table in the first place. So such illusions shouldn't be surprising, especially if the price is high.

Regret is a thing