Yes, definitely agree. I didn't mean to say that the buyer has no skin in the game, just that the seller receives no compensation if the buyer pulls out of the deal.
In this case, the buyer probably spent more on the deal than I did, but that wouldn't really comfort me if they had backed out last minute.
Yes of course. Basically when a deal falls through after spending weeks or months on it, both sides lose big. That's why you want to do it with professionals and have a good Lawyer and CPA on your side.
In this case, that wasn't that much of a concern. I felt like the buyer had the skills to grow TinyPilot from $1M to $10M+, but he didn't have a technical background, so he'd have a hard time recreating the business from scratch even if he had access to a lot of our secret sauce.
If I were selling to a direct competitor, I would have had to be a lot more protective about trade secrets. I could make them sign contracts saying that they wouldn't use the information against me if the deal falls through, but I'd have a hard time enforcing it, and the cost of suing them would probably be higher than anything I'd hope to extract for a contract breach.
In this case, the buyer probably spent more on the deal than I did, but that wouldn't really comfort me if they had backed out last minute.