Not saying this is what happened necessarily, but sometimes as a startup, you find yourself in a position where you must either sell to someone/anyone or the business must shut down (and you're left with the debt and with long-loyal early employees/friends whose equity you were never able to pay off).
I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.
In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.
If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.
In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.
That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.
Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.
So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.
I was a founding member of a social enterprise startup which ended up in a position very similar to that.
In our case, we were lucky that we had two options to sell: (A) to an investor who wanted to pervert our mission, vision, and values for profit; or, (B) to a nonprofit who didn't have the money to give us more than a single paycheck or two worth of payoff for our equity.
If we had sold to Option A, a dozen of us would be wealthy right now. But the company we built would have been perverted into something unrecognizable.
In our case, to our founder's credit, we sold to Option B to keep the dream alive, but none of us became wealthy... and the nonprofit just shut down the company we founded only 2 years after the purchase (partly because the nonprofit didn't have the business savvy to make it sustainable). _Everyone_ was just laid off.
That means, our noble sacrifice only extended the lifetime of our noble vision by 2 years, and we're certainly feeling less good about it.
Because the alternative would have meant that a bunch of us bleeding hearts would have the economic freedom right now to do all sorts of good for untold decades to come.
So I'm just saying, sometimes you don't get to have good options and everything sucks, no matter how well-intentioned you are.