Yes. I’ve worked at a couple of companies now where this has happened. It’s really hard for founders to let go of their “baby” and as such, there’s a lot of rationalization that goes into the decision when they sell the company or go public.

One of the common ones is that they will have a large enough say to keep the culture of the small company intact and often say things like “we’re just going to continue being ourselves but with more funding or resources or XYZ so it’s really great!”

In the end, they don’t accept the fact that the larger company’s values/culture is their company now and they can try to enact change as much as they want but they are no longer the key decision maker for the company overall.

For a public company at scale, it’s incredibly hard to 1.) grow exponentially or greatly and 2.) keep the hiring bar high enough to maintain your culture. There’s a trade-off made there that you’re public & you cannot slow growth at the risk of upsetting shareholders but it’s a catch-22 cause you can’t also let your salaries go out of control to hire the right talent for your culture cause you have to explain that cost increase to your stakeholders.

Fair point. I’m not sure if they did, or simply believed the benefits (financial and otherwise) of being bought outweighed the loss of company culture. They at least seemed to, in my experience.

JWZ — or maybe Spolsky — wrote about (a more general case of) this. You can either grow fast, or maintain company culture. You can’t do both.

Being bought by a larger company is just one case of growing really fast all at once.

Management implies, the old owners imply this, and some large fraction of the rank and file employees buy this.

When the rank and file realize there is no lottery ticket for them, or that they are the lottery ticket, then there's a lot of burnout.

And yes, I am fun in interviews. :)

There was that time Apple “acquired” NeXT...

But for all n where n > 1, no.