While the full details aren’t publicly known these sort of “exits” are generally not home runs for most team members. They’ll get some payout but hardly life changing and will get absorbed into BigCo still needing to find a new job if they don’t stay on.

These kind of arrangements generally get the investors their money back plus a modest return. The employees generally don’t get much, relative to the risk they took.

An exit can be a nice payout, but only retirement level payouts for a very few. Most will need to find a new job and the market is pretty shit right now and I doubt the foundation has the funds to hire the entire team back.

What does AWS get out of this? Couldn't they build their own offering on top of DuckDB, just like MotherDuck has been doing?

Buying the team and having them all quit is such a bad outcome for AWS, especially they would not keep any of the IP, which is owned by the DuckDB Foundation. I don't think they would be that short-sighted.

You make it sound like every worker agreed with this. Is this actually true or is it more about the founders exploiting their workers by selling out to one of the most devious anti-worker tech corporations?

Is profit sharing, like what you're implying, actually happening? If so, in what quantity?

There is no guarantee of a nice exit.