I have no idea why they agreed to the deal, one imagines a bunch of competing interests ranging from late D, E, F+ round holders, to founders, to influential employees. By the time a company is selling to a mega-conglomerate (in effect, a holding company) for 20 billion dollars it's pretty hard to un-grind the sausage on how a bunch of competing incentives got resolved.

As a founder? Obviously I hold unless I know something is rotten in Denmark and it's about to collapse like a Michael Siebel sale to Autodesk. Are you kidding? I've got a startup so successful that I'm already a billionaire and my choices are:

- let it ride, be a star, chart my own course - go work for fucking Adobe lol

Yeah, easy one.

If I'm an early VC or a limited partner with some structural reason to need the cash before some accounting period ends or something? Maybe I want the sale. Maybe I own a bunch of Adobe stock and I want the consolidation. Maybe a lot of things.

Don't know why the deal got agreed to pending regulator approval. If I'm an already richer-than-God founder, or an employee who can either get full value for my shares or get Windsurf'd in some preference shenanigans, or most anyone else involved? Then fuck Adobe.