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Comment by tdumitrescu | Hacker News Reader

> By 2016, it was telling hiring prospects that it was profitable, but also that, “We will not be selling the company unless some insane whatsapp like thing happened. We’re building a forever biz, not a flip.” So either Vidpresso lowered its bar for an exit or Facebook made coming aboard worth its while.

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Unfortunately there seems to be high incentive and little downside to claim 'we will not sell easy'. You get the upside adoption by any customer concerned with longevity, and when you decide to fold for pennies you write a blog post about your incredible journey.

I get it. You get tired of a product, it doesn't do as well as you hope, but you still want to get acquihired and make sure your hardworking engineers don't end up on the street. Nonetheless, its frustrating when evaluating a startup's product and use 'longevity' as a factor.

The product isn't going anywhere for our customers. That's a big reason we did the deal.

There were likely people at Parse who thought similarly at the time of their acquisition:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/28/facebook-shutters-its-pars...

Glad you got that in writing because most founders forget that part and think that even if Facebook's management changes they'll still honor their promise. Good thing you're not that guy.

What does it mean by "bough the talent and the tech, but not the company"?

I think that's a poorly-worded way to say "the product will be built into facebook itself"

Hmm, I think it's a legal thing to get the right money to the right people (by affecting taxes or liquidation preferences or...)

If Facebook buys the company's IP but not the company itself, and the company pays out that cash in dividends and winds down operations, people could get paid quite different amounts than if Facebook had purchased all of their outstanding stock outright.

Buying the company can sometimes be buying certain liabilities they don't want to deal with.

Fool me once, fool me can't get fooled again.

It's a negotiating tactic, too. If you tell people you'll sell cheap, you will have a hard time selling for top dollar.

A lot can change in a startup in two years. Startup founders are fallible human beings after all, and are as likely as anyone else to say things that, in retrospect, were hopelessly idyllic or optimistic. Everyone who founds a startup on some level believes that they're building a company for the long-term. Either way, it sounds like they were a fairly small company, probably struggling to break through in an incredibly competitive vertical.

Hopefully they all just made a whole bunch of money.

They may well have had their reasons, but whenever I read or hear things like this, I can't help thinking a while about how we've lost the use of the term "sell out."

Vidpresso is an app that should have been built into Facebook in the first place. It was primarily used to help broadcasters broadcast to Facebook live, so I don’t think it’s necessarily a bad thing it got rolled up into FB.

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