Selling your company — or not selling your company — is a complicated decision. Price, timing, pride, and a host of other factors play into the decision. Hell, you might simply enjoy running the business, be it a startup, unicorn, or public-market behemoth.
Sometimes the decision is made for a company’s leadership team. Zendesk’s work to avoid selling itself only to later acquiesce at a lower price is one such example. Twitter, which is in the process of a messy sale to Elon Musk, is another.
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All the above has been on our mind as Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of crypto exchange FTX, circles Robinhood. After securing a material stake in the business, he denied active talks to buy the U.S. zero-cost broker. Robinhood itself stressed the fact that its founders have voting control of the business, meaning that th …