[johncoogan]

It depends on the price they paid for stock or the exercise price for stock options. If you were an early employee and your received options when the company was only worth $10m or something low, you could make money.

The risk is that one of the later investors had a ratchet or something that would allow them to claim more of the proceeds in a sale. You can't just take $220M cash, subtract $105M in funding and pass that to the founders and employees. The preferred shares were probably "participating" meaning they get a portion of the common.

Here's an example of a ratchet: https://www.forbes.com/sites/petercohan/2015/11/07/unicorn-s...

[nunez]

I figured there were one or more investors participating preferred especially since Chef held most of their valuable IP as an open source project.