You pay a pittance for the company, engineering it such that investors get little, and then pack the real value into the hiring offers for the employees. TechCrunch would carry the news that the company sold for X million dollars, but technically it would sell for 10 percent of X, while the rest went into fat signing bonuses and heavily laden vesting schedules for the founders. With no prompting from us, Twitter had given us a plum offer.
