A decade ago I was in the heat of a deal negotiation with a large company when they suddenly went silent for a week. I was furious. I thought they were trying to string us (startup) along to see if we might back off from some of our deal terms as the deal dragged on. Only much later did I learn that their deal team simply got pulled into a 50x bigger deal. And no-one bothered to let us know the reason for the delay (maybe there was some concern about rumors of a larger deal leaking). It was t...
