After four years of work and ridicule, early employees at the company
    are said to have been actively encouraging a sale, even if it didn’t
    come with a massive acquisition price. Sources say that many employees
    didn’t have much to gain anyways. Duplan had offered only tiny shreds
    of equity, convincing hires that Clinkle could be a billion-dollar
    company and their share could turn into tons of money.

A lesson I've learned the hard way is to never let your sense of greed impair your judgment, especially around the relative certainty of success of a startup. A stupendously well-funded startup indicates only that the founders are good at fundraising, not that they're good at building a product or a company.