You don't need to take the meeting. If they're serious, you will get another phone call with "How does $1 billion sound?"

If a company really wants to buy you, saying no will not make them go away. It will make them up their price.

Very true. I think this can be generalized to a scenario when an investor reaches out to you and you tell them to circle back in a few months as the company is busy in building out the product.

The same happened in Google's case when they asked Ron Conway to come a few months later to invest. And so he did. For sure Google had a good team, product, etc., but this sure enticed Ron to invest in one way or another.

It's all about expected values and your subjective preferences over those. All of this is determined under circumstances of uncertainty.

You can make a reasonable estimate of the current value of your company, and a reasonable estimate of how likely you are to be offered that value.

You can also make a reasonable estimate of the future value of your company at time X, and a reasonable estimate of how likely you are to be offered that amount at time X.

There are large margins for error in these calculations. You can determine, though, the net present value * probability of the current and future options. The goal of this exercise should be to determine not the exact values (because your error margins are too big to have large confidence in the resulting numbers), but to determine which option you like more.

It's ultimately a subjective decision, but if you are not confident that you will get enough money to definitely want to sell now, then wait.

The original article and the one I linked both put the advice in more absolute terms, but it is obvious that the decision to sell or wait is a difficult one. The goal of both articles is not to answer the question, but to help you understand first that it is not a casual decision, and provide details which may help you decide whether you want that process now.

That scenario seems extremely unlikely though. If you talk to FB with the mindset of "just to see what price you can get", I doubt they would have gotten anywhere near the 19B price tag. That was an extremely well negotiation process that leads to the price: they must have at least some idea what's going on.

In this particular case, I can almost guarantee that the reason the deal ended up this huge is that the founders absolutely, positively didn't want to sell, and especially not to facebook. And facebook had to literally make them an offer they could not refuse (in the sense of the amount of money for every employee... not as in the Corleone sense).

You can glean some idea of why that was from this public information https://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads. This is in direct voice of Jan Koum, the founder and CEO of whatsapp. That gives you some idea of his personality and it's an entirely accurate one. I'll be willing to bet large amounts of money that the Zuckerberg himself had to engage in a full court press before getting a response at all.

I think you missed this part:

It's usually a mistake to talk to corp dev unless (a) you want to sell your company right now and (b) you're sufficiently likely to get an offer at an acceptable price. In practice that means startups should only talk to corp dev when they're either doing really well or really badly