Agreed. I don't know that any argument about their relative merits as a company, a product or a competitor really trumps the "fuck you money" factor in this case. $170m is several metric, cubic butt-tons of money, even granted some fairly substantial fragmentation of equity among top executives and managers.

That said, one does have to keep in mind how relative the concept of "fuck you money" really is. I, for example, am broke, bootstrapping a company entirely out of cash, having to do huge amounts of consulting in order to pay two part-time employees and support my comparatively large living expenses inherited from my well-off salaried days. Yes, I do mean "to pay the bills" - as in, just to break even operationally. Finding the time to work on the projects I'm passionate about building into products, which are in the same vertical as the consulting customers but with which there exists no meaningful overlap is very hard (that is, it's not really feasible to get the customers to shoulder or subsidise the development costs - the aims are just too unrelated to short-term projects, especially since I don't have the cash cushion to float anything especially long term).

If I could sell my company for say, $5m, that would be "fuck you" money to me. It wouldn't mean that I'd never have to work forever, but it'd definitely afford me, oh, say, a good decade of being able to sit around and code whatever I please, after winding down all my customers and telling anyone who has any debts to collect: here's your principal pay-off, now blow me.

OK, if I wanted to hire some team of nontrivial size to help me along the way, fine, $10m - the extra $5m would fund, what, about 30-35 $100k employees for a year, or 7 of them for 5 years?

I'm not even interested in imagining what 9-figure exits look like. I don't care. For someone who has no real assets to speak of and no real cash nor credit, even a large six-figure exit would be a ginormous game-changer.

The point here isn't to put forth my sob story--not at all. My point is that a reasonable threshold of, "Hey, who could blame them for taking the money?" could be much, much lower than $170m, or considerably higher, depending on the position you're coming from and the relative interests bound up in that. Obviously, if I had a net worth of a few million, cashing out of a valuable, disruptive company for $5m, once its relative merits and goodwill and brand and reputation and future marketability potential and all that are considered, would seem rather absurd. But to someone with $0, $5m is very much "fuck you money." Just imagine what $170m is.

I think PG alludes to this dimension of things pointedly in "The Venture Capital Squeeze" (http://www.paulgraham.com/vcsqueeze.html), where he encourages VCs to allow founders to partially cash-out prior to any "liquidity events":

"As things currently work, their attitudes toward risk tend to be diametrically opposed: the founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the VCs can afford to be "rational" and prefer the latter.

Whatever they say, the reason founders are selling their companies early instead of doing Series A rounds is that they get paid up front. That first million is just worth so much more than the subsequent ones. If founders could sell a little stock early, they'd be happy to take VC money and bet the rest on a bigger outcome."