It's not supposition, I'm speaking from experience. For a tech startup, 10M is a price point at which you have a small team and a product with a few man-years of development behind it. Acquiring the product without the team is only worthwhile when the product is a brand. Otherwise, the team/product combinmation is what gives the company most of that value.
To name one example: in 1999 my company paid $13M for a company with 11 people, most of them developers. The company failed to offer them an interesting package so they quit after the acquisition. A team on our side was left to deploy the software. After a few weeks we decided it would be easier to develop the same functionality from scratch.
On the other hand, the assumption was that you 'owned' 5% of the 200M company. If you are handcuffed, then you own less. If you owe the bank 70% of the value of your house, only 30% is yours. Same with vesting.
I respect your experience, but I don't understand how your example has anything to do with $13MM vs. $200MM. In neither case is the CTO, VP/E, or MTS more or less necessary to the acquiring company. You can "own" 5% or 100% of 200MM, but if an acquirer thinks they need you to execute on the acquisition, they're going to keep you, right?
The idea is that if you own 5% of a company worth 200M and you quit, the remaining 95% ownership of the company cares enough about it that they will replace you and move on. In this scenario there is no acquisition, and you walk away without making the company lose any significant value.
I've seen that happen: one of the fully vested founders of the company I worked for left on a sabbatical. After six months he decided he didn't want to come back. By then all his functions had been taken over by other people. He sold some of his stock, kept the rest and went back to grad school.
The point is not so much the size as the fact that you can walk away more easily if you own a small fraction of a company without causing a significant drop in value.
To name one example: in 1999 my company paid $13M for a company with 11 people, most of them developers. The company failed to offer them an interesting package so they quit after the acquisition. A team on our side was left to deploy the software. After a few weeks we decided it would be easier to develop the same functionality from scratch.
On the other hand, the assumption was that you 'owned' 5% of the 200M company. If you are handcuffed, then you own less. If you owe the bank 70% of the value of your house, only 30% is yours. Same with vesting.