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Comment by intricatedetail | Hacker News Reader

Why exit is thought of as a success? It's kind of like a pump and dump scheme. Does it mean founders suddenly lose their vision and abandon their customers to become an actual product for shareholders?

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It is a success because it is a concrete milestone that shows the founders have fulfilled their roles to satisfaction. An exit is not the only success, you could also simply transition into being a successful private company, but then there's no clear finish line. Now it is clear, no can argue the founders success, it's written in black and white and made public for all to see, they achieved an undeniably great thing.

Customers are always a product for shareholders, that doesn't suddenly change when a company is sold to other shareholders. And anyway, it could be a good thing, obviously Etsy has great experience with taking care of their customers and their partners and with running a huge business. Who says anyone was abandoned?

> Now it is clear, no can argue the founders success, it's written in black and white and made public for all to see, they achieved an undeniably great thing.

No one can argue the founders' successful profit. I know nothing about this company and have no opinion on it one way or the other, but I know companies that are borderline fraudulent (and I am aware that is a strong claim) that are going public via SPACs and the founders are getting rich despite not having a product or paying customers.

They have exactly 1.63B reasons to sell. You don't get to judge them with zero insight into their business and visions for their lives.

Also, I would openly laugh at anyone who claims that they’d personally turn down 1.63B to keep their business pure. That is an overwhelming amount of money, in the “none of your descendants needs to work” range.

I’d sell out for much, much less money.

On the contrary if I ever built a business that was worth 100 million or more I'd take far less than my share of it if it meant that I could get a clean exit and not have to stay on as an executive for a few years.

Perhaps my mentality is part of the reason why I will never build such a thing.

Apparently there were many other billion dollar acquisition bids turned down

Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion https://www.inc.com/allison-fass/peter-thiel-mark-zuckerberg...

Discord reportedly rejects Microsoft's $12 billion acquisition offer https://www.newsbytesapp.com/news/business/microsoft-12-bill...

Amazon and Alibaba have approached 5-year-old startup Wish, but the CEO seems to want more than $10 billion https://www.businessinsider.com/wish-rumored-to-reject-acqui...

Mark Zuckerberg also turned down a $15 Billion dollar offer from Microsoft.

But there's a difference between turning down a bid because you want to maintain control over your vision and because you think your company is just worth more than the offer. The point is just that if you get what you think is a fair offer, and it's a very large offer, it would be hard for most people to say no.

It's obviously not impossible for someone to turn down a billion dollar offer because they think it's not enough, or to maintain control over their company. But I think people drastically underestimate how easy it would be to not sell out and walk away. The kind of people who will look at that offer and say "no thanks" are far and few between. There is a non-trivial chance that most of us have not met anyone like that.

Also of note: Groupon turned down $6B from Google. They now have a market cap of $1.6B 11 years later.

https://www.pon.harvard.edu/daily/win-win-daily/win%C2%AD-wi...

Not all of that money will go to the founders.

Most of it won't, there's only one founder and from what I understand his share is less than what you'd expect. I imagine all the early employees did pretty well from this though.

This is actually a very valid question. Every situation is different — usually I’d agree with you, and I actually hesitated when describing the success as due to the exit. In this case, however, the exit is likely due to the ability for the combined entity to execute the original vision better than before, and it also allows us to put a dollar number on the value of a space / business that unsophisticated bystanders continue to dismiss as “not a real business” (even on this page!). That makes it a net win for the overall resale platform / circular commerce ecosystem, and makes future innovation in this space easier to finance.

A similar situation occurred with the acquisition of MySpace, which immediately boosted the value of all the other social networks at the time — the space had gone from being a bunch of “worthless websites,” to important next-gen media platforms that might crown the next emperor. Recruitment/funding/etc became a LOT easier after that.

because they suddenly have tens of millions in their and their shareholders' pocket.

Let someone else worry about growth as you cash out

The context of the parent comment is what investors think. Investors — especially VCs — like acquisitions; they get them paid out at the 10x they were looking for, within their fund's time-horizon.

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