For a lot of people in town, the shuttering of Participant Media this week felt abrupt and out-of-nowhere—a sucker punch to Hollywood by an impulsive tech mogul. But it wasn’t. Talking to finance sources this week, I learned that Jeff Skoll, the eBay billionaire and philanthropist who started Participant 20 years ago to make top-quality content with a social-impact agenda, actually hired Goldman Sachs last spring to run a last-ditch sale process. The pitch deck sent to prospective buyers touted Participant as a “category-defining” business “focused on timely and emotionally transformational stories which speak to the world’s most important issues.”