Ask HN: Good experiences of being acquired by a large company? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Good experiences of being acquired by a large company?

31 pointsdclaysmith10 comments

With all of the horror stories going around about being acquired by Yahoo!, Aol, and Google (to a lesser extent), does anyone have any feel-good stories about be acquired? Which companies?

UPDATE: Found this thread on the homepage http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2252258 (Amazon seems to be doing it right)

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As a product manager at Right Media, I was personally pretty happy with our acquisition by Yahoo. Things gradually got more bureaucratic, but Yahoo gave out some very generous employee retention packages which effectively more than doubled my already pretty generous salary. When Microsoft came along and inflated Yahoo's stock with an acquisition offer, I thought it was Christmas. You better believe I sold every share I could the second I could.

After a year of Yahoo, I had the savings in the bank to go off and start my first company with confidence. And if I hadn't wanted to start my own thing, another couple of years at Yahoo would've put me on a pretty nice financial footing. I'm quite pleased that acquisition happened, and I suspect most of the employees there feel the same way.

I'll admit I'm not super sympathetic when people complain about their product's decline after being paid millions of dollars for it. del.icio.us was a pretty sweet bookmark manager, but for the lion's share of $27.5MM I'd happily cock it up with an acquisition.

37Signals have a very clear "Getting acquired by big companies is the worst mistake you can make" stance. I'm not sure where it comes from, but they seem to think that anyone who gets acquired by a big company will regret it. They say the same things about getting VC funding.

They, themselves, have successfully bootstrapped and are making tons of money and have not gone down the acquisition route and, the best I can tell, that's the basis for their argument.

Despite their ongoing campaign, they do not and cannot say which acquisitions will turn out well and which will turn out poorly, so they seem to default to the stance that everything will turn out poorly, but that's simply not true.

They also make one big error in arguments against acquisition: It's a short-term perspective. You're not tied to the startup that acquires you forever. You can leave any time. And many great startups have been started by people whose first company was acquired and that acquisition gave them the financial freedom to start a second company under their own terms (I don't think their founders have much in the way of second company founding experience). Great founders don't have just one idea, they have many. And they execute them. Twitter? FourSquare? etc. Yeah, their prior startup acquisitions by Google might have not been a good fit for one reason or another, but has anyone bothered to ask the founders if, in retrospect, they're glad they did it?

My acquisition experience was amazing. I had offers from multiple companies and I picked the one that matched-up best to our company culture instead of optimizing for potential future value -- turned out to be a good decision because not only did we have a blast, but the company that acquired us took us from literally zero pageviews per day to 20 million per day (back in 1999 -- that was a lot back then and still is!). And the value of the company that acquired us increased 10x over the next couple of years (the company is no long around in it's previous form and its stock did crash during Bubble 1.0, but everyone walked away happy).

So when you read anything from 37Signals that states, in one form or another, "acquisitions are bad" and "venture capital is bad," then take it with a grain of salt.

A web analytics company in my neck of the woods (Omniture) was acquired by Adobe a couple of years ago. I've talked with a dozen employees there and I've heard nothing but good about it from both the business and technical sides of the house (I interviewed there to see for myself a couple of months ago).

Adobe's leadership still seems to have the "founder" mentality and gives their acquisitions (at least this one) relative autonomy to continue to do what they do well in addition to solid financial backing and all of the nice resources of a big company (benefits, software discounts, etc.)

Adobe is helping them expand with a brand new building with great freeway access. This will also help them attract new hires because it will be about 10 miles closer to a much larger metropolitan area than their existing campus (which is about as far from the freeway as you can get). So +1 for Adobe.

There are companies out there that acquire you and then leave you alone as long as you keep doing well. The canonical example here is Berkshire Hathaway. They don't acquire tech companies, but there are conglomerates out there that try to emulate Berkshire, to varying degrees of success.

Lots more might say that they follow the Berkshire model, but talk to people that have been acquired to get the full story.

Of course, if you start losing money hand over fist after the acquisition, even Berkshire would step in and shake things up.

Miniscule data point: The very small consulting company I worked for got bought by a big-ish dot com company (which is still in business, so not a casualty) and I got a very significant pay increase as part of the deal.

I know of a research company that wound up getting bought by Northrop Grumman largely for the engineering talent - IP was only a secondary consideration. From the stories I've heard, NG was very kind to the engineers and let them keep doing things nearly exactly the way they had been doing them. One of the senior engineers managed to talk his way into 6 weeks of paid vacation every year in addition to the usual holidays, which is virtually unheard of in larger American companies.

You should also understand that big companies buy small companies for many different reasons. Sometimes they want a new revenue stream and sometimes they just want the brain power and have no interest in the small company succeeding. A founder who cares about his or her company's future will look closely at the strategic reasons a larger company may be eyeballing you.

To answer that question one has to examine the culture of the smaller organization in contrast to the larger. If you're working at a small startup with an us vs. them mentality and you thrive there, odds are you will not enjoy transitioning into a job where you're required to submit reams of paperwork to HR, get an ID badge, interface with an incompetent mid-level manager who has to report to a boss who reports to a boss who reports ..., attend endless meetings about future meetings, socio-political silos, mind-crushing reviews, pep rallies, ominous rumors of layoffs, social embarrassment, an influx of marginally-skilled and unmotivated coworkers, offshore IT, business casual dress, the realization that all your efforts at the startup went to line the pockets of the founders who vacation ad nauseam while you continue to toil away on a dying project with increased responsibilities for similar pay while your new management makes every effort to erase your contributions while simultaneously reminding you that they bought you, albeit by directive and with corporate cash, then it is quite possible that every cell in your body rejects your new corporate overlords. However, if you're the kind of person who enjoys an anonymous routine backed by a well-known entity, then by all means, focus your attitude and culture into one of eventual assimilation, making friends and cutting deals along the way, so that when the eventual day comes, you'll be in a position to personally benefit from the acquisition by either cultural similarities or the desire to willfully carry out the bidding of your new masters.

Hear hear.

The positive comments, as of this comment, appear mostly to be of the form "I got more money" with an implication that, technically, there was still interesting work. However, I'm not seeing much in the way of remarks regarding culture clash or lack thereof.

Having now been acquired "successfully" twice (once quite recently), and having seen numerous other acquisitions from the acquirer's side or second-hand through friends and family, I have yet to see one go well.

More specifically, for the startup-minded folks, who joined a small company in large part because of the size, being integrated into a larger company is, at best, temporarily tolerable. For all of the reasons you outlined, the outlook tends to be much more bleak. Effectively double an already good salary would help assuage the pain, without totally eliminating it, and, usually, the retention packages are on a time scale of years, rather than months or even quarters.

I could imagine that a totally hands-off acquisition would work out much better, but I have yet to see such a one.

I wish I could upvote this twice! Should be required reading for undergraduates.

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