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there has to be another side to this story.


There certainly may be, and I would love more info. My experience as an investor and entrepreneur, however, has been that the interests of investor and management can have a tough time aligning when money is on the table.


Quite. seems rather unusual that the founders want to grow larger and the investor wants to take the money offered though ...


It doesn't seem all that unusual at all. Let's assume (I have absolutely no information here) that the valuation of the Sequoia round was $100M. This is a 9x valuation jump, and they are getting cash and AMZN stock, which is almost as good as cash. That's a great win for Sequoia, and it's not too unlikely that their limited partners were looking for any liquidity event to ease the pain of the losses over the last 12 months. In fact, the more I think about it, that's not an unreasonable explanation at all.


the CEO has had a great exit under his belt, Zappos had strong revenues, and a founder that wanted an IPO.

I'm not sure a VC could find a "safer" bet for a startup aiming large.




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