Yeah, I used to hear all the time that "a startup is worth $1 million per engineer in a pure …

Yeah, I used to hear all the time that "a startup is worth $1 million per engineer in a pure acquihire", but learned the hard way this is a myth. When we were talking to various companies about acquiring Sandstorm.io (my startup) in 2017, one of the companies told me, essentially: "We aren't interested in your IP, only the employees. We'll give you a set of job offers for them. We will then sum up the salary and equity grants from these offers, and call that the acquisition price. If you want to take some of that money and redirect it to your investors instead, that is up to you." I was a bit taken aback. Obviously I wasn't about to take a cut of my employees' future comp and give it to investors. Instead we ended up going to Cloudflare, but not as an acquisition. Cloudflare told us very honestly that they couldn't justify buying the IP, but they would be willing to acquire the company for $0 to wind it down for us. I decided to just take the job offers but keep the company independent as an open source side project, thinking maybe I'd revive it eventually. …