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Comment by echelon | Hacker News Reader

Everywhere I've worked, 75% or more of acquisitions or acquihires went extremely well and resulted in strategic benefit and/or gain of great talent. There are only a couple of instances that stand out as being a bad fit, and one of those companies later got sold to another player in the same space for a profit. So it's really never been a bad use of capital from my perspective.

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Are you sure it isn't 76% with all that hard cold data you're using?

My current office was an acquisition. Two cohorts of my colleagues are from acquisitions. One of our newer major revenue streams. Acquisition.

Unrelated thing not core to the business that we sold. Acquisition we spun off at a profit.

It's not 75% exactly, but this isn't even napkin math. Just top of mind. I feel as though you're belittling my experience and my person. Why? And also, please don't.

I've told you that from my direct experience, most acquisitions I've been witness to have been well thought out, calculated moves. It turns out we're doing a good job.

Please don't be so hostile.

76% is "75% or more". So it's covered.

A lot of big company initiatives are acquisitions in non-obvious ways. For example even Google Maps started off as an acquisition of Keyhole Corp - a small startup focused on mapping technology.

Android was an acquisition.

YouTube was an acquisition.

Google Docs was an acquisition.

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