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Comment by BurningFrog | Hacker News Reader

"Selling" and "selling out" are not (always) the same thing.

My dad worked in M&A for a long time and handled the sale of a plastic molding company where the owner was getting quite old and couldn't really run the business anymore. The company was extremely well established and had a very strong and loyal customer base and ran off a single manufacturing facility in a small town out in the boonies. The owner certainly wanted a fair value for the company but he also strongly desired that the plant be kept open and employees retain their positions. Adding this sort of a restriction on a company you're selling is possible - but it is hellishly expensive, generally you're considering adding some sort of third party oversight and auditing for all HR actions and business decisions. If you buy a company under these terms you can end up utterly destroying the company if supply chains shift - the local labour pool is unsustainable or a plethora of other reasons... And almost certainly this burden is mandatorily bundled with the company - so once you've rode the company value down a bit and are looking to get out all of the buyers will know how much of an impossible situation that company is in.

At the end of the day when you sell a company you are divorcing yourself from the future direction - you might be invited to stay on as an executive - and the new owners might listen to you... or they might not - that's entirely up to them. Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).

I would never shame someone who wanted to keep an ideal going from making an exit they personally need to make - always prioritize your health and happiness over any venture - but when you sell you're accepting the fact that at any moment the buyer may completely reverse the direction of the company.

  > Any promises or commitments you've made as an executive are only as good as your word - and when you sell your company your word stops having any power (because you sold that power).

one option i don't see discussed a lot is selling to your employees (converting to a coop, full esop etc)

I think this mostly goes against the idea that the owner wanted to exit with significant value in most cases. Companies (even small ones) can easily accrue a lot of value just reinvesting earnings over a moderate amount of time which is likely going to be out of reach of an employee collective or other local funding source.

For the company I was talking about above it definitely didn't have a local or particularly regular customer base - they were well known as a market leader but the sort of thing you might buy every few years at most.

As an employee, I don't think I'd ever want this.

Can you think of a notable example when they weren’t?

stackoverflow? I mean, there still are many people.

I think it’s still too early to judge the SO purchase, but I agree that it hasn’t been a problem so far.

facebook, zuck took all the investor money but maintained all the control.

Anything bought by Microsoft in the past 10 years. Minecraft, Github, LinkedIn, all are better products today than they were at the time of sale.

Sounds like the attention of those properties' users is worth more in some other metric than the maintenance/improvements cost in engineer time. I wonder what.

Minecraft drives actual profits on consoles - you have to subscribe to play with your friends. Some of these consoles (XBox) are even directly owned by MS.

Github is a massive piece in the developer ecosystem. It drives adoption of other MS products that can integrate with it, and generates a lot of goodwill towards MS.

LinkedIn, eh, that's probably the weakest property. On the other hand, it's massive in the enterprise space - again lots of goodwill, this time from "suits", and maybe some cool metrics about hiring.

Linkedin has premium account tiers for recruiters. Now I haven't seen any of the numbers, but the business model does pass the sniff test.

> Minecraft

Take it back!

Seriously though, I remember MC before it was a kids game. It was already becoming one by the time Microsoft bought it, but since then almost every update has been gimmicks for kids. The world generation is still ridiculous (jungles next to arctics), the weather patterns are binary (hard rain, or nothing), and proximity chat is practically impossible.

They've made a lot of money off making it into a kids game, but I personally haven't been delighted by any updates since they took it over.

If it's any consolation, there are really good mods for proximity voice chat and jungles next to arctics is being fixed in the next major update.

I don’t quite agree that every update has been gimmicks for kids - I can’t really point to a “childish” new mechanic added. Maybe your perception of the game has changed?

You only just got under the wire with that 10-year cutoff; MS purchased Skype in May 2011.

Not sure if this goes for LinkedIn, but I agree with the others.

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