The company should have been worth at least the cash it had on hand, which has been reported as ~$100M. It's also been reported that all vested equity and VC shares were bought out (although apparently perhaps with a few exceptions for people who declined the offer), which meant that the employee unvested equity stakes were "undiluted" from whatever they were before (hard to judge, but maybe 5-10%), to 100%. So every employee had their stake in the company increase 10x-20x. So if the company had then decided to simply close up and distribute the remaining cash as dividends to the employees, it would be as if each employee had simply been bought out pre-deal at a $1-2B valuation. And that was the absolute worst case scenario - clearly Windsurf found a better deal with Cognition.