Because you have a good income stream but you want more money now? Arduino is a lifestyle business (a good lifestyle, don't get me wrong) much more than a growth business. It's easy to price what the income stream is worth.
I don't know if you realise it or not but the point you're making is self-contradictory. If they make great margins, that's why qualcomm would want to buy them, but not why they'd want to sell and have to share it. I guess it makes sense if you're saying arduino are suckers
But honestly, on HN, no one should have to explain why founders seek exits.
Just like any other founder, if the vast majority of their net worth is tied up in the company, they'd like to have an exit to take some chips off the table and diversify their investments.
They're not suckers, they're just getting older and want to retire (as far as I can tell, this may actually be their motivation), so $10 million today sounds a lot better than $1 million every year for the next 15 years.
Why are you so adamant that they must be suckers?
Don't these kind of purchases happen all the time?
Let's say you want at least ....10 years of fat profit worth for you to sell your business. Could be more since it's sustainable, has high margins, etc but let's pick the round number.
Big company comes along and offers you 11 years of profit worth of money.
You sell. They know it's going to take a bit longer for the purchase to pay for itself but they also want to transform the business a bit to funnel in developers to popularize their main products and take wind out of the sails of competitors which they project will bring in the equivalent of at least 3 years of your business's profit over time along with some other stuff....so they're happy to overpay for your business since it'll probably cover the lil bit of extra risk
In that case everyone's a winner...except maybe us as customers.
