What’s the median acquisition size? Heck, what’s the 75th percentile?
I’d bet most of these acquisitions are of lifestyle businesses with few/no paths to scale. Probably just aimed at the tech teams or execs.
Nothing much to see here
Just asking - because if my company were to be acqui-hired I have serious doubts about my ability to stay at Apple specifically - given (for example) their prohibition on most of their FTE SWEs having a personal GitHub account or doing any kind of moonlighting. What does Apple do when they really want to acqui-hire a company but the people they want don’t want to work at Apple without special-exemptions from the normal rules?
You're right that often people do have to interview to remain employed (and thus to receive these benefits).
Would that be a full-on interview as if they were applying for a job, or just some kind of "cultural fit" screening?
It seems contradictory to me: if the hire is important enough to spend a lot of money on (even via an earn-out) then why alienate them with uncertainty about the offer?
I guess the assumption is they don't have a better offer?
But if a few key employees get together then don't they have the ability to scuttle the whole deal? "Keep doing this thing that Apple was willing to buy, but on better terms, and look for a new buyer" sounds like a pretty good alternative to "take Apple's earn-out on Apple's terms with nonzero risk of getting nothing."
This is another reason for the vesting payouts for employees. If there wasn't some reward, and you had to do a full interview, why not just interview somewhere else?
Regarding your last question, it is true that a cabal of disgruntled employees could cause problems for an acquihire. I have seen cases where the acquisition was contingent on a certain number of engineers passing the interviews. Another good reason for a big financial incentive.
I don't think that would lead to better terms in a new deal. The next buyer is likely to learn that the company's employees boned the interviews, which is going to look bad.
I guess that makes sense, but it’s also a reason to view the hoops as less of tech screen and more of a hazing ritual.
If some new people from an acquired company were to join and I heard they skipped the third-year CS undergrad oral finals simulation step I'd be glad that there's some progress being made - I wouldn't feel resentful at all.
"I had it bad when I was younger, therefore you should too" is amongst the worst our instinctive behavioral tropes.
Supposing I write a _killer app_ with a friend and get a patent for it - and it ends up with tens of millions of users quickly - and Apple really wants it for themselves at short notice (too short a notice for them to try to recreate the software code, sic their legal team to invalidate the patent and market it to get enough users) - how far would Apple bend to accommodate my _think different_ attitude?
They obviously did well enough to be worth acquiring.
But a ‘pivot’ is essentially the same thing - in terms of what gets scrapped.
I see an acquihire as the market actually validating your company value even if you haven’t pivoted into a hockey stick product.
You used to be working on AI powered eye glasses that could tell when fruit is perfectly ripe but now you work on an in house travel expense system the Apple sales people use to log their Uber bills.
Is it that realistic? Why would anyone take such a deal? Why would Apple expect those employees to stay, and given this why would they pay a premium?
My sense was that generally teams are hired because they have proven that they are competent in something specific that Apple wants to do, even if the actual code isn’t used directly.
- Turi became TuriCreate/CoreML
- Faceshift became Memoji
- Workflow became Shortcuts
- FoundationDB is unchanged and underpins iCloud
- Shazam is unchanged
Many of the acquired companies can be directly seen in shipping products (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...)