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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

Once the company is considered a loss they want to get as much of their money back as quickly as possible. What else would you expect from them?

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What if a product that costed us to develop was over $100,000, and I am getting an offer to buy it for $1,000? And we have many products like this example (close to 20)

Is it normal they will literally force you to sell it for pennies on the dollar? I understand that it was their money, how would you handle it? Just sell it and move over to the next thing?

It doesn't matter how much you spent to develop it. All that matters is how much it's worth. So if the highest offer you can get is $1,000, then offer to buy it for more ($1500).

If you can't afford to buy the assets yourself maybe you can find a new investor to buy the assets on your behalf.

Otherwise: yes, you should just move on.

What staunch said. If you can't afford $1500 to buy your code back, you're not serious enough to be arguing with your VC's anyways. I'm embarrased that I wrote 100 words up there and didn't just say this myself.

Or heck, offer to buy it for a little less, since I imagine selling it to a member of the company would be less complicated and you can extract that in the price. (Though perhaps I'm wrong and it's easier to sell out of the company?)

What's there to handle? You owe a fiduciary duty to your shareholders to notify them of the offer. If you're in a tailspin, presumably the VC is going to control the board decision, and you can safely expect them to act in their own interests. $1000 is irrelevant to the VC, but if you're being forced to entertain $1000 offers for $100k investments, your BATNA isn't great, everyone knows it, nobody's ever going to give you a good deal, and the VCs are pretty much paid to understand that.

look up 'fiduciary duty'

if it's a vc it's not their money (99%) and they have a fiduciary duty to their investors to get as much of their investment back as possible.

that's why...

you could always offer $1,001 of your own money to buy it personally, etc.

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