alt Hacker NewsTrue. Assuming there are buyers. And I'm not sure why buyers would pay more than value.
In other words, the sale wouldn't really achieve anything other than lock in the capital write-off. The return would be trivially small.
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lelanthran • today at 11:22 AM
The controlling voters don't really need to force a sale; they could force a wind-up of the business.
"Sure, we invested $100m, but you are still only breaking even. May as well close up shop, sell the data for as much as we can get and split the proceeds amongst us investors" is just as possible.
The point isn't necessarily to get buyers to pay more than fair market value. Most VC firms run a series of separate funds, each with a target date to return cash to limited partners. So at some point the VCs need liquidity even if the valuation isn't great. This is a normal and expected part of the business model.
In some cases a VC can kind of "extend and pretend" by getting one of their other portfolio companies to do the acquisition in an all stock deal.