specular

Very difficult to answer this with specificity, but in general there are a number of factors that influence the amount of cash you ultimately net from a sale, including:

- Cap table: what % is owed to other founders, investors, employees, etc?

- The total acquisition price may include substantial legal and other fees that will lower the actual amount received by the owners or shareholders.

- How much of the acquisition is financed through cash vs. equity? Equity may vest over a certain time period, and be subject to certain requirements (your sustained performance, ability to clear legal scrutiny, etc.).

- Taxes.

Taking all of this (and probably more) into consideration, it doesn't seem unreasonable for a founder to ultimately net <10% of the total sale price. Again, this is all wild speculation in this particular case.

In some sense, this is exactly what decompression does. The question, if I understand you correctly, becomes one of "how is this decompression program designed?" Does it require any particular inputs? etc.

Although somewhat different than what you're describing, you might be interested in arithmetic coding, which encodes data to a single numerical value that can later be recovered by an inverse process.

Agreed. Is this pronounced "coke"? Regardless, this is a very interesting paper.