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Comment by JohnJamesRambo | Hacker News Reader

I know lots of founders will read this, please for the good of humanity stop being acquired. I know the money is so alluring, but how much is your soul worth and will that money make you happy? The future of humanity depends on tech people making tiny principled stands like this over and over. Don’t believe the lies spewing out from the acquiring company. Nothing will ever be the same again and your product will be either killed or mutated into something hideous. Read the WhatsApp and Oculus and Nest stories over and over again.

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While I totally agree with this comment, especially from experience knowing that the reality of an acquisition is far from the rosy picture promised to everyone, the truth is that founders and especially investors are motivated by the exit.

Some founders start their companies to be flipped. Some start with the intention of going for the long-game but find the reality of competing in the market exhausting and emotionally draining. Some realize that they won't be able to capture the market share they want. Other times internal strife or conflicts with investors get in the way.

There are many motivations for acquisition and the realities of the difficulties of startups make any good offer very appealing. It's very hard to resist.

Related, does anyone think that founders believe the “rosy pictures promised to everyone”? Like you said, there’s a ton of reasons for founders to want to sell, even ignoring the existence of investors who would obviously like a payout. Founders should known better than anyone exactly what they’re agreeing to with an acquisition, but that doesn’t remove the personal benefit.

More generally, I never really hear stories of founders stopping their work at a company that isn’t after an acquisition or IPO. The alternative is the founder going “I am retiring and leaving this person in charge, but maintain my ownership of the company and will be taking 20% of the future profit in exchange for my 10 years building up this company.” Maybe it happens and we just never hear about it, but without some alternative for founders to cash out at the end it’s not surprising that selling the company off is what happens.

Somewhat ironically, Google is an example of two founders doing just this.

One thing to help fix this is for the VC community to become more comfortable with (and even encourage) funding rounds which allow founders and early employees to get some liquidity from their equity. Taking a company from idea to IPO usually takes the better part of a decade (or longer), and it's pretty unfair to ask people who have already risked a lot to keep living on peanuts and hoping that some unforeseen situation which may be largely beyond their control doesn't send the value of their equity to zero before they get to IPO.

"...will that money make you happy?"

Yes. Very. More than you can imagine. Trading good work for great sums of money isn't selling your soul. No one is under a moral obligation to build something that benefits the future of humanity. Furthermore, the vast majority of startups (including the 3 mentioned) were arguably never going to be humanity-changing businesses regardless.

If this is a conversation worth having at least reference bio-science and space exploration startups that actually have a chance to change the world.

> I know the money is so alluring, but how much is your soul worth and will that money make you happy?

I really don't understand this attitude. If someone offers me enough money so that I never have to work again, you expect me not to take it?

I'll sell any company if I could get $4 million after tax and never have to work again. Every single time I'll take that offer. I guess that's how much my "soul" is worth. And yes, that will make me happy!

To me it seems really preposterous and dishonest when somebody does NOT think like this.

We have one life. The time we do not spend with our children (or the time we postpone having them "for the greater good") can never be returned back.

Yeah, the only way I'm not selling my business in that scenario is if I'm already in a position where I don't have to work again.

The risk of a startup being acquired has also prevented me from buying startup's products, both personally and for my employers, because chances are the "great news, we got acquired" is anything but great news for the actual customers. That announcement is usually the sign to start looking for alternatives.

Do you also not buy products from big companies? Because they also kill their own products or let them wither on the vine out of apathy.

Sure, but we're talking about probability here. Established enterprise products from large companies usually have a published roadmap and guaranteed support period years in advance. It may be a mediocre product, but a business knows Oracle isn't going to kill off their ERP system any time soon, and also knows the minimum sunset date for all versions and can plan updates & upgrades accordingly.

If Oracle ERP is your standard it might be hard to get anything modern. Thought experiment, for which product are you more confident about its longevity: Google Voice or Basecamp?

I'm just using Oracle ERP as an easy example. It's a spectrum though, Oracle ERP just happens to be on the far end of one side, while a < 2 year old startup or any new(ish) Google product is on the opposite end.

(Though even more established Google products that are not Search/Ads still never make it far past the middle)

How many people are buying Oracle ERP as a new purchase these days? Isn't that pretty much a legacy techology?

For a startup product to be "safe", the startup has to not go under (and many do) and also either not get acquired, or get acquired and have the product not change too drastically.

There's an awful lot higher chance of a startup product not being a "safe" buy compared to an established company to kill a somewhat popular product and you can always look at their track record before making a decision (something a startup, by definition, typically doesn't have).

No evidence this is "usually" true. It is sometimes true. It is also sometimes true that the acquired company thrives.

The deadpool of acquired companies runs very, very deep.

While it might not necessarily be true of 50%+ of companies that are acquired go into the deadpool, it's common enough that an acquisition of a company's product that you use should cause you at least to make sure you have some sort of strategy to deal with a potential deadpool situation. Maybe it's not a guaranteed probability, but it is indeed very likely.

Sure. Agree completely. However it's worth noting that the customer-centric view, while valid, is rarely a good one. Companies are acquired b/c they are about to go out of business, because the IP is good, because the team is good, because the customer list is good, etc. Pissing off early customers is often the cost of growing the thing to its fullest potential.

This gets said a lot, but it's not internally consistent. If you are forced to piss off the people who love you, perhaps you shouldn't call it "growing". Call it "a pivot". You're taking a flyer for the _possibility_ of future growth.

> The future of humanity depends on tech people making tiny principled stands like this over and over.

No it doesn't.

What about Instagram?

Acquired at 10mn users, not really used by anyone except SF hipsters.

Now a massive juggernaut and the same size (in MAU) as Facebook was when they acquired it.

And YouTube, and of course DoubleClick.

>The future of humanity depends on tech people making tiny principled stands like this over and over.

Well put. And the reward? You + family/friends look back on your work with deep fondness & respect if you choose principles > acquisition $.

>I know the money is so alluring

It's the only motivation. Why do you think wealthy and high income people fight so hard against repaying the society that educated them and provided the infrastructure to allow their business to flourish?

It's because most people want to believe that their success is due to their own specialness rather than some mix of luck and prior circumstances.

I forget where it came from-- I thin Warren Buffet but I can't source it now-- but there's a sort of thought experiment or anecdote about this: Give everyone in the US a dollar. Then randomly choose half the country and have them give their dollar to a specific person in the other half. Repeat this process with the remaining people until there's only 340 people that each have a million dollars, then talk to those 340 people: You'll have 340 stories of how they personally overcame the odds and beat out everyone else to become a millionaire

Absolutely. There are studies where groups of people were examined while playing "Monopoly", but some players started with a massive money advantage. If (usually when) they won the game, they attributed it to their own skill at the game, not the massive advantage they had at the start. Being wealthy fucks up people's brains.

People are capable of saying one thing, and thinking another. I do it all the time, mostly for political purposes. There are many times where it is not in my interest to tell others what I really think, and I assume other are also not playing the game with all of their cards showing.

I.e. I assume people know the role luck plays in life, but are also not interested in the consequences of acknowledging that, and/or are interested in the consequences of pretending like they deserved it.

This is known as preference falsification (https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Preference_falsification). It's something interesting to think about. I often try not to falsify my preferences, even if people don't like me because of them.

A minimal amount is preferred. But at the end of the day, it’s a very good tool to deal with allocation of resources. It’s also the definition of politics.

People do it all the time with friends and relatives. You don’t up front tell someone they’re only worth 10 min of your time, or you prefer visiting someone else in your free time. But you make up excuses or stretch some truths to give both parties plausible deniability, which allows everyone to save face.

Workplace politics is the same. You have a limited amount of time and energy to devote, so you will have to sacrifice some coworker’s or manager’s priorities for other colleague’s priorities. But you’d be foolish to tell them up front. Enter workplace politics, where you have to figure out whose aligned with who and for what purpose do you can figure out your next move.

The more scarce/valuable the resource, the more politics comes into play. And if it gets too scarce/valuable, it will end up in violence/war.

Being able to navigate these signals is a crucial factor to succeeding in society, in my opinion.

>> Why do you think wealthy and high income people fight so hard against repaying the society that educated them and provided the infrastructure to allow their business to flourish?

Sorry, but I'm not seeing it. Here is a list of the Giving Pledgers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Giving_Pledgers.

They have all committed to giving more than half of their wealth to charity. 5 of the 10 richest Americans are on that list. It amounts to around $1.2 trillion.

There are other stories like PayPal and the numerous new companies that came after. I'm much more in favor of having Tesla and SpaceX than not

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