Raised over $50M and could not even get acquihired

> The company I was at raised over $50M and generated $3M of revenue...

All that says is that they're good at burning up their investors' money. (And depending on their expenses, $3M in revenue could even result in significant operating losses.)

> ...and could not even get acqui-hired

Has the company built anything that a larger company would find it useful to acquire?

Revenue != profit. Assuming all $50M was fully "invested", the ROI looks very poor. With revenues of $200M + the situation would be very different.

VCs consider 20x return on invested funds as a success.

They take a good, hard, look in the mirror and go join another startup as one of the early hires so they can help avoid all the mistakes that they made themselves.

Or they go into consulting so they can continue having strong opinions and separate themselves from the chaos they bring.

On to the next.