Hmm, while these may be the emotional pangs of going through the process, there is a much greater failure that destroys much more value (both monetary and tangible benefit).

Joining a large company prevents expanding total addressable market.

The acquirer wants to tap an existing resource. While growth is commendable, it's only perceived as an option within a narrow customer base or market segment. It's increasing ROI, not capitalizing on new changes in the market.

This looks like a failure to innovate, but that's correlation not causation; not the root cause. There's plenty of innovation, it's just constrained by a limited business model.

I've never seen a company break out of this trap. If you make money from ads, b2b users (Slack), or b2b management (Oracle), it's impossible to change those stripes.

Microsoft could make a video game unit because they think "software in a box." Amazon never will.

It's not usually the giants where this really plays out, but the middle tier. Adobe, Atlassian, Intuit, PayPal, Salesforce, Walmart labs. Like trading Bitcoin for pizza in 2015, they made a great financial deals that paid off, even legitimized the space and were ahead of their time, but lost out on underpinning entire future markets.