(Good Technology)
Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt.

Good Technology CEO Christy Wyatt sold her company to competitor BlackBerry for $425 million, took home about $6 million for herself, and protected her investors' investment, The New York Times reports.

That sounds like a good thing, but it wasn't really a happy ending for a company with a long history of dramatic turnarounds.

That $425 million sale was less than half of the company's year-earlier $1.1 billion private valuation. Employees' common stock became worth a mere $0.44 a share, down from $4.32 a year earlier, The Times reported, and some employees were hit with astronomical tax bills on the high value of their stocks at their peak, using life savings or borrowing money to cover those bills.

After the sale, Wyatt told Business Insider how she did due diligence on the sale to BlackBerry by staging a meeting at a "secret location" in Palo Alto for key product managers and engineers of both companies. She described that meeting as if it was magical, where it was like each company was looking at "its twin across the room," she told us.

But clearly, not every employee was feeling the love. Employees were so angry at the money they lost on the fire-sale price to BlackBerry that someone broke a glass conference-room wall at Good's headquarters, The Times reports.

A long and dramatic history

While Good Technology is being shown as an example of unicorn startups tanking, it wasn't really a startup. Good was a 15-year-old company that had already gone through many pivots and exits.

Good was a 15-year-old private company that had already gone through many pivots and more than a few exits and attempts to IPO.

It began life in 2000 as a company called SpringThings, an email-reader device that got crushed during BlackBerry's heyday. It shifted to software and Motorola bought it in 2006.

Then in 2009, Motorola sold Good to another company, Visto, which around the same time received more than $260 million from BlackBerry in a patent-infringement settlement. Visto kept the Good name.

In this incarnation, Good finally found its calling helping companies manage their employees' mobile devices — a market where its old rival BlackBerry also competed.

Good raised about $146 million in venture capital. But the market quickly matured as mobile devices became more of a known quantity in the enterprise. Good's competitors were snapped up by tech giants like SAP, IBM, Google, and even VMware, which bought AirWatch for $1.54 billion. The biggest standalone competitor remaining in the space is MobileIron, which went public in June 2014.