The Founder Who Turned Down a $10 Billion Acquisition Offer, Five Years Later, Here Is What Happened

In Silicon Valley, there is a certain kind of moment that very few people openly discuss. A founder, who is typically under 40, sits in a conference room, either at the acquirer’s headquarters or at their own office, and hears a number read aloud that could change their family’s financial situation for six generations. Ten billion dollars. All in cash. Spend the weekend. Then, occasionally, they refuse. The unspoken B-side of the founder-hero narrative is what happens to those individuals five, ten, or fifteen years later, and it’s not always the happy ending that pitch decks portray.

The cautionary tale that no one in the startup community wants to mention is Peter Szulczewski. Amazon allegedly made a $10 billion cash offer to Wish, his mobile-first commerce app that sells cheap goods straight from Shenzhen, towards the end of 2015. It was reported by Business Insider. It was confirmed by TechCrunch. The offer was turned down by Szulczewski, a former Google engineer who had worked on “really big matching problems” for six and a half years before switching to e-commerce. At the time, the reasoning made sense: Wish was on a rocket ship, yearly sales had surpassed the “single-digit billions” threshold, and he thought the business could eventually reach $100 billion in gross sales. Jeff Bezos is free to keep his money.

The part that the quote tweets don’t cover is what transpired next. Wish briefly defended Szulczewski’s choice when it went public in December 2020 under the ticker WISH at a valuation close to $14 billion. The unraveling then started. Shein and Temu, who both had tighter logistics, quicker delivery, and aggressive subsidization, directly challenged the marketplace’s cheap-goods value proposition. Growth stagnated. Losses increased. Szulczewski resigned as CEO in 2021. ContextLogic underwent a reverse stock split in order to maintain its Nasdaq listing, but by 2023 it had become a shell of a company. Additionally, Qoo10, a Singapore-based e-commerce company, purchased Wish’s main marketplace in early 2024 for about $173 million. The $10 billion offer from Amazon is not a rounding error. That amounts to 1.7 cents on the dollar.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Jason Citron’s Discord story. Microsoft reportedly made an offer to buy the gaming-focused chat platform in early 2021 for between $10 billion and $12 billion. Citron, the founder of a video dating site, a multiplayer game from the Bebo era, and an earlier company called OpenFeint that sold to Japan’s GREE for $104 million in 2011, left.

Discord’s user base was still expanding quickly, its monetization strategy had not yet been thoroughly tested, and the platform had truly taken center stage in Gen Z communication culture. Discord is still private after five years, with its most recent secondary-market valuations of about $15 billion. It hasn’t collapsed, but it hasn’t skyrocketed to $100 billion as some had predicted. The business is still run by Citron. Even though the upside hasn’t been particularly strong, the “no” seems like a fair decision overall.

The case that is taught in business schools is Evan Spiegel’s 2013 rejection of Facebook’s $3 billion Snap offer. At the age of 23, Spiegel turned down one of the biggest acquisition offers ever made to a founder of a consumer app. Snap’s private market valuation reached $10 billion in less than a year. It was valued at $24 billion when it went public in 2017. Unfortunately, for the majority of the ensuing ten years, the stock has moved sideways and downward. Snap’s market capitalization is currently between $12 billion and $15 billion, which is several times greater than Facebook’s initial offer but far less than Instagram-inside-Meta’s trillion-dollar trajectory. Spiegel became wealthy. Additionally, he saw his potential buyer outgrow him by about 50 times.

In some respects, the most instructive example is Qualtrics’ Ryan Smith. When his survey software startup was unknown outside of Utah in 2012, Smith declined a $500 million acquisition offer. In 2018, just prior to its intended IPO, SAP paid $8 billion to acquire Qualtrics. After going public once more in 2021, Silver Lake took the business private once more in 2023 at a valuation of $12.5 billion. A portion of the earnings were used by Smith to purchase the Utah Jazz and, more recently, to support significant investments in sports media. Throughout his career, every “no” added up to something bigger.

The unsettling reality that a founder’s confidence in their own product has no bearing on whether it eventually succeeds in the market is what unites these four tales rather than chance. Wish might be a quarter the size of Walmart, according to Szulczewski. It’s not. Spiegel thought Facebook would be eaten by Snap. It didn’t. Citron thought Discord’s moat would continue to grow. Most of the time it has. Smith thought Qualtrics had a category that no one else knew about. It proved to be correct. The romance of the rejected buyout offer seems to overshadow a reality that most VCs and founders are reluctant to publicly acknowledge: the correct response is frequently “take the money,” and the cost of making a mistake is typically not public humiliation. It’s much more enduring, quieter, and depressing.