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Comment by ketamine__ | Hacker News Reader

It's mostly about talent but nobody wants to embarrass the entrepreneurs?

Why is it embarrassing?

They obviously did well enough to be worth acquiring.

An acqui-hire is typically considered a failure for VC-backed startups. (Not that one should necessarily be embarrassed for “failing” in this way, but that’s just the reality).

I could think of worse things than getting acqui-hired by a FAANG and made a Director or something in the company. Not sure that's much of a failure honestly!

Success to you. Failure to the investors.

It's certainly better than going insolvent, but it also implies that you company has failed to reach the usual hockey-stick growth targets and that your IP is "worthless" enough to be bought as overhead for hiring someone. So, while not a total failure, it's really not a compliment.

I think, from reading the back and forth here, that there seem to be a number of different types of acqui-hires and as such we can't really be sure to what extent the acqui-hire represents a failure.

See the example of Tesla 2013. Apple is not hiring to keep the startup or the innovation. But for the up or even worst:for the talent. Its like selling your house to the scrap guy

Typo "for the IP or talent"

Yeah - I mean I guess you can make it sound bad.

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.

How is it validating? In an acquihire situation the company gets bought and then everything but the people is flushed down the toilet.

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.

> 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.

Sometimes aquihires are just execs at big companies helping their VC or angel friends save face and keep the deal pipeline open.

It entirely depends on the company.

- 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...)

Worfklow is maybe one of my favorite acquisitions by them because it's far easier to run something like this as an OS-level daemon with OS-level permissions than a third-party app. Funnily enough, the Workflow team was folded into Proactive Intelligence, i.e. the old Cue team, another startup that was essentially acquihired for the same reason. Cue was trying to extract all kinds of information from your email, but it turns out you need more than email, which is possible when you run as an OS-level daemon.

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