acquirer

The smaller the acquirer is, the better the chance you get to stay in a more controlling spot.

Whether you walk away from the deal is not their problem; it's the acquirer's problem.

If the acquirer is actually going to use your technology, that will obviously be a large factor in determining the sale price.

I think the assumption is that whether the new hire(s) can keep things running smoothly becomes the acquirer's problem.

It gets tricky when the acquirer is significantly away from a funding event.

The founders can't write a sale contract that promises that you will do X, Y, and Z; all they can sell the acquirer is the company's assets.

If the acquirer is a large firm with in place development and product management the chances of you staying in control of the product are slim long term.

It’s also not by definition an inversion since Avago is the acquirer, but the result the same.

Also the founders at best might get an employment offer from the acquirer, if they're lucky.

AMD's acquirer could renegotiate the agreement knowing that it could walk away from x86 and focus on ARM and GPUs.

Their revenue now is preventing the future acquirer from selling those bars at near 100% gold value later post acquisition.

However, in general even in those cases the acquirer wants at least 1-2 key employees to help them through the transition.