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Look at how LinkedIn and Microsoft operate. The two companies have their own offices, salary tiers, office perks and lots more. Every department (including roles like marketing, recruiting, sales) is separate. Heck LinkedIn employees even use Slack rather than Microsoft Teams. It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership.

What you said might be true for the majority of acquisitions at that scale, but it is by no means a strict rule.

A tree can grow for 300 years.

A tree can be chopped down in an afternoon.

All it takes is for the next CEO to decide to undo this and it's undone.

Same can be said about every company, acquired or not

The difference being, pre acquisition, they had their own CEO. Now they have another CEO of a different company.

It’s a fundamental change in dynamic.

After sufficient time has passed, every company will need a new CEO, as no CEO lives forever. Each new iteration of CEO, whether internally or externally recruited, will bring a fundamental change in dynamic. You simply can't guarantee that the next generation will have the same values, views, and ways of working as the previous.

The CEO of a different company in charge isn't that different than an internally sourced CEO in charge.

I think the difference is that when you have lots of duplication (of systems, departments, job functions, processes, etc) like after an acquisition, there is very tempting low hanging fruit there for a CEO in a cost cutting frame of mind.

If you want to boost numbers this quarter and don't care too much about intangibles, the incentives really push towards gutting the acquisition.

A CEO of an independent company has different incentives to a CEO of an acquirer.

A company culture is a reflection of the company's leadership.

The culture of Microsoft has gone through radical changes between gates, balmer and nadella.

But a culture isn't _only_ a reflection of the leadership, it's all the interconnections of people and organizations within the whole company.

A leader can come in and make changes, and often these changes first have to break everything that's there already; without care what replaces the broken structures is just chaos; by default that chaos is the governing culture without more inputs and work from leadership.

These changes are most pronounced when 2 large organizations become one because both cultures have inertia (whole foods / amazon, slack / salesforce, etc). But yes, of course when CEOs change there's change to the corporate culture, but because there's only the force from the CEO's changes not entire cultures bashing into entire other cultures, the changes tend to be more gradual.

I am not an MBA or sociologist or really anyone with a worthwhile opinion, I've just been around the block and have the stories to tell or retell...

Twitter wasn't merged.

Leadership, however, has changed.

(Extreme example, there are many others. Carly Fiorina's demolition of HP comes to mind.)

A tree being chopped down is only bad news if you built a treehouse in it. Be loyal to people instead of companies, sell most of your stock, and it won't be a huge problem.

Interesting. As a technical product, LI utterly sucks. It is slow, buggy, crashy, leaked passwords and so on.

I always assumed Microsoft is to blame, but apparently not!

GitHub operates the same way and doesn't suck :)

> It is the perfect example of independent company culture regardless of ownership.

The point of OP is not that the Borg will assimilate you from day one. Inertia, operational convenience and upper management laziness can delay the implementation of the hegemonic culture - why mess with a division that works? The point was that there should be zero expectation of changing the corporation's culture to match yours, they paid 27 billion so that you no longer have an independent voice on the market and be forced listen to them.

Because of how corporations operate, with strong internal diffusion of management and operational practices, the assimilation will happen, it's just a matter of speed. The old company has ceased to exist.

It will happen, sooner or later. Some key management will stay for the first years because of retainer money, then they will leave. They will be replaced by parent company executives looking at some quick success with the newly acquired company.

Culture will fade, politics will kick in, etc

Microsoft didn’t buy LinkedIn (or GitHub) to grow their business.

Linkedin was because everyone needed to have a “social” strategy back then and apart from maybe Dynamics, there’s no real synergy (I don’t like that word) between LinkedIn and Microsoft’s other businesses.

The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

In both cases tight integration with the rest of the organisation makes less sense than Salesforce buying Slack - which is something that could be tied directly into Salesforce’s core business.

Exactly. Does anyone still remember Salesforce Chatter [1]?

Buying Slack was Salesforce's way of getting back into that market.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/07/salesforce-takes-chatter-m...

Oh I do _remember_ this pile of shit. A couple of PHB's from a sibling org are trying to push it down on us each and every year. We send them a lovely slide deck that describes how awful the software is, and that's it, we're allowed to use gitlab issues for one more year.

I wouldn’t be surprised if ms bought linkedin purely (or partially) for the legal access to the user dataset.

> The GitHub acquisition was part of their plan to start repairing their fractured relationship with developers - almost a PR tool.

I think that's a surface-level interpretation of the benefit to Microsoft. Azure and GitHub CI are a great match for using idle server compute for one and Codespaces is another.

Isn’t Yammer still a thing?

Github acquisition is a little more than this. There are VSCode and Azure linked to this acquisition, and to spin and link them together. From closely coupled to at least a little far away.

I won’t be surprised if soon you can spin your backend on Azure in 2 clicks from VSCode because your code is on GitHub. Stuff like that. Maybe it won’t be advertise on the GitHub directly. But for sure it will be there available in 2 click on the Azure and VSCode.

I agree with everything you're saying especially from the individual's perspective, but I think its valuable to look at the incentives from Salesforce's perspective.

They paid an incredible amount of money for Slack because of what Slack is. In my opinion, it doesn't really matter that Slack ceased to exist (which I agree de jure it did) because de facto the Slack culture still exists as a minority now. If anything, the incentives at Salesforce should be to preserve Slack, not whittle it down, because they thought Slack was worth billions of dollars. Is Slack's technology really worth that much? Maybe, maybe not. Is Slack's customer base worth that much and do they have a big enough moat that they won't start evaporating? Maybe, maybe not. More likely the value at Slack was created by the sum of its parts together, including culture.

Maybe you can make the argument that Salesforce thinks they bought a company that was worth less than the sum of its parts and that they can unlock value by making changes, but the acquisition and "culture clash" imply to me a big corporation throwing money at something they don't really understand.

The only real way that these acquisitions make sense is "synergy" (eurgh), Slack just as a normal business isn't worth more to Salesforce than market value if it's just going to run Slack as if it's an independent company, but in order to buy it they had to pay 54% premium to the pre-acquisition share price. So why did they pay 54% more than Slack is worth as an independent company? Well, now they can bundle Slack into their other services and grow Slack that way, and vice-versa they can start integrating Slack into their other CRM services and sell more CRM software into Slack's customers. That's why Slack is worth more to them than it is to the open market. It's the same business model as Microsoft getting Cloud customers by leveraging their office suite etc. Especially in these large businesses it's often an enterprise sales game anyway, and all the real winning/losing happens in the Sales/Marketing and C Suite, not the engineering team anyway.

“Synergies” are great but many of the most profitable acquisitions are, at heart, bets that the acquiree was undervalued.

But even those are typically bets about the potential of the acquired company, rather than its current state. In other words, the acquirer typically believes that they possess a set of skills that will enable them to bring the potential of the acquired company to light, demonstrating only post-hoc that the company's original valuation was off.

As an analogy, it's like house-flipping - the acquirer needs to have a very good "eye" for potential, and then needs to put in significant work to realize that potential. As I understand, this is the model that Danaher follows with their acquisitions, but they're only able to do this because of that unique set of skills they possess internally, which sounds to me not that qualitatively different from regular synergy.

It doesn't need to be synergy, here are some other reasons:

* To prevent a competitor buying it

* Because a competitor already bundles something similar and you don't

IE, as a stop loss, rather than better growth prospects.

Many acquisitions work that way.

Yup. A friend of mine worked at a small software compant that sold their product either as a standalone piece of software or as a plugin for the 3 biggest platforms in the field. One of those 3 bought them and promptly stopped developing the stand alone version and the plugins for the other platforms.

The total number of sales of their product plummeted, but the acquiring company didn't care, all they cared about was a that a large enough fraction of the people currently using the standalone version or on of their competitors platforms switched to their platform to get to keep using those features.

I'm in the midst of a similar situation to the Slack team, but on a smaller scale. Our app is a product of the people and the culture. You can't just steamroll the culture and not affect development and the end product.

I've been really surprised at how naive senior people in our parent company are on this front. Many have spent their whole careers at this one company, so they have very limited understanding of anything that doesn't align to what their company does.

Combine this lack of experience with a big dollop of hubris (they work for BigCo!) and it's easy to imagine a well-intentioned executive destroying the value of the acquired team and product.

Harsh but ultimately true. I was acquired into Salesforce and my experience matches this. Salesforce is a giant machine and you will be integrated sooner or later. When your big champion, in Slack's case the CEO, leaves you should expect the pace of integration to accelerate rapidly. This isn't the end of the world, Salesforce lets people vest in peace and then leave without hard feelings if they aren't happy with it. Those who want to embrace the Salesforce way are embraced and can have "a Salesforce career". The people who have the hardest time personally are those that try to fight the inevitable and push back against integrating. You can say a lot about Salesforce but people there are generally reasonable and not evil.

I imagine it will be the same with Adobe and Figma.

Fighting back is not always futile. I’ve worked for a company that that was spun out again (to private equity, with only arguably better results— the original company was sufficiently damaged, too many of people long gone, and new owners too unwilling to invest) in part because enough people refused to integrate and become part of a bigger whole.

That may be true in this case, but I know folks who work at GitHub and LinkedIn and apparently Microsoft has mostly been keeping hands off at these companies. I’m sure at least some functions have been merged, but they seem to have done a surprisingly good job of it.

I worked for Cisco for a long time: the integration of acquisitions in large companies (at least there) involves a calculus of size vs. current profits vs. complexity of integration. A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture. Cisco badges rather famously didn’t even work at Meraki offices, they were that pointed about keeping hands off. Scientific Atlanta was another one that got left alone for a long time, to the point that when Cisco people visited we all had to remember to dress up a bit because their offices were much more “casual Fridays means khakis and a polo shirt” than Cisco’s rather laid-back “it’s Friday, you’re lucky I’m wearing pants” culture. Once it suited Cisco to integrate them, though, the gloves came off and things moved much more quickly. So if the LinkedIn/GitHub leadership are aggressive about pushing a “hands off, we’re making money here” approach, Microsoft likely won’t deem it worth their time to bother as long as it’s not causing issues for the mother-ship. Much easier and cheaper to simply replace the hiring process for them and let the culture gradually acclimate to the larger company through attrition instead, while integrating the pieces that matter for now.

I had similar experience at Amazon. My Amazon badge didn’t work at SF Twitch office.

After experiencing that I started to periodically write at amazons elevator whiteboards “Twitch is NOT Amazon” as little petty rebellion.

I'm pretty sure that's just how the badging system works. Amazon is orders of magnitude too big for 'everyone has access to everywhere' to make sense. When I traveled I sometimes had to talk to people (or send email) to make sure my badge was activated in a new location, even for offices in a different city but the same business unit. There were also restrictions based on whether you actually worked on a particular thing, even for non-acquisition parts of the company.

My badge was working at Amazon's SF location without anything of that. Only international travel required security contact.

Companies do this all the time. The Android team famously had their own isolated building for the longest time. Some of the newer acquisitions and bets are not accessible to Google employees. Most places have this sort of thing.

> A company like Meraki or WebEx that’s making a lot of money and is larger or more complicated to integrate (because they have lots of their own systems and infrastructure) may get left alone, particularly if the former owners are aggressive about maintaining their existing culture.

Thanks for this, it goes a long way toward explaining how Cisco has a software list and a written offer for GPL for their products, and Meraki has an unpublished email address (open-source@meraki.com) that they ignore for months on end.

I often wondered how Cisco, who was famously sued for GPL non-compliance after the Linksys acquisition, could repeat that blunder with Meraki.

I know folks who worked for at least 8 different Microsoft acquisition other than Github and Linkedin. All of them were squeezed into the 'Microsoft Way' within 3 years, with varying levels of success.

Github pre-Microsoft was an engineering-led wild west. They prioritized building tools like 3D file diff viewers (is that still around?) rather than optimizing the performance of the enterprise product and handling simple asks.

Their handling of enterprise customers is what lost them our business to Atlassian (also ugh).

Post-Microsoft, the product has been championed by the right owners. Enterprise works great, and we happily came running back. It only took five years for them to make the necessary adjustments.

Microsoft did that.

Bell Labs was an engineering driven wild west, ATT is much better now /s

Yeah, but the whole point of Bell Labs was to be an engineering driven wild west. They had so much money, they could afford throw money at PhDs and let them do cool stuff.

Tech tends to suffer from employees getting bored and wanting to do cool stuff that is totally disconnected from the business.

Which is the reason why UNIX escaped into the wild, Berkeley was eventually sued, and the Lion's commentary forbidden to keep being published.

Lion's is available to buy new now. It was unavailable for a while, but it's been back on the market for years now

I am pretty sure Github also felt the heat from Gitlab. There was a time, five or six years ago, when Gitlab was way ahead with impactful features like built-in CI and project management.

It seems that thanks to its network effect and Microsoft's guidance, Github managed to retake the lead.

Microsoft was a large investor in Apple, Facebook, and Open.ai as well.

> There's no culture clash between Slack and Salesforce. There's a Slack culture that once existed, and now there's Salesforce culture the company those workers now work at. You can embrace it, you can be unhappy, and you can leave.

hmm, there seems to be some misunderstanding. simplifying, there are two types of acquisitions: holding and integration. for holding a company getting acquired remains quite independent. for integration the company getting acquired is integrated into the parent. how this integration happens is up to both participants. sometimes both companies have to change, other times one company imposes their culture over the other. but from what i’ve see, IT companies (especially american) definitely prefer deep integration into the parent. in other fields (and nations) holding is more popular.

Yeah, and deep integration of disparate businesses is not something humans have a very good chance of pulling off.

Trying to force two organic entities to merge into your vision. You have a very small chance of that working out. So small that, as an investor, I don't trust it will benefit me.

This is mostly true. However, there are acquisitions which managed to keep their unique identity and even different salaries (!) after getting acquired.

1. For culture difference: I have heard YouTube culture is quite different than their parent (Goog) before and after aquisition.

2. After Microsoft's acquisition of LinkedIn, from various anecdotes, not only their previous culture is maintained but employees salaries are different as well (salary difference not entirely due to LinkedIn presence in valley vs Seattle - when both LinkedIn's and Microsoft's office exist in a same country outside USA, the employees have different level of perks and monetary compensation).

I would be more surprised if acquisitions were fully integrated into the company. Normalizing the culture and salaries across different companies seems like a great way to piss off everyone in the acquired company, and if they leave then you've lost a significant amount of value.

This strikes me as overly cynical. A pendulum swung too far. Yes, someone who takes "we don't want to change a thing" at face value is probably overconfident. OTOH, someone who says that the old culture "ceases to exist" is underconfident, I would wager. Reality is somewhere in the middle.

Have you been apart of an acquisition before? it's pretty damn accurate and not cynical at all.

It is not cynical. It is just how organizations and social groups work. It takes few months, but culture changes. People start to behave differently.

And if you insist on not changing, you are better off to change the job entirely.

This isn't entirely true. Even at the most surface level, "buying" a company can mean almost a dozen things.

For example, a holding company can buy your company and do ... absolutely nothing, just treating it as an investment. This happens a lot too. Off the top of my head, AMC was once owned by Wanda Group based out of Dalian, Liaoning, China. Yet I'm sure that nobody who worked for AMC could tell, or even knew this was the case.

You are equating culture with power structure. While power indeed exerts heavy influence on culture, they are not one in the same. There is also a difference between explicit documented company culture (a la Netflix) and actual culture in the minds of individuals and teams.

I've worked at places that acquired companies, and aspects of the acquired companies' culture persisted and sometimes spread beyond their group.

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture.

Which is kind of wierd since the culture as reflective of a company’s emergent collective decisions are what makes the product of a company succeed. If an acquirer isn’t buying the culture, they may as well stay a customer unless they think their own culture can make a product that supplants the acquired one’s and retain the customers.

This is why 50% or more of acquisitions fail.

And it’s usually not explicit that the acquired companies culture is ‘removed’ - rather top down decisions that don’t make sense for them (due to culture differences) end up being applied, and end up mangling things and forcing prior strong culture people to leave.

You might need to define success, and fail, to quote a statistic like this.

There are multiple groups of people (old owners, new owners, sellers-employees, buyers-employees, customers), multiple assets (physical, intellectual, human, customer-base, code etc)

To ascribe failure to and acquisition I think means taking the viewpoint of they buyer - did the get what the wanted, or not? Not the viewpoint of employees or customers.

As judged by the buyer, based on post acquisition surveys.

On further consideration the thought could be summarized by reference to the parable “The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg”

"A cottager and his wife had a Hen that laid a golden egg every day. They supposed that the Hen must contain a great lump of gold in its inside, and in order to get the gold they killed [her]. Having done so, they found to their surprise that the Hen differed in no respect from their other hens. The foolish pair, thus hoping to become rich all at once, deprived themselves of the gain of which they were assured day by day."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_that_Laid_the_Golden...

You’re saying the acquired company needs to be assimilated into the parent company, although there are many examples where the acquired maintained its own culture. Not all acquisitions are the same.

> It's a tough message but when someone buys the company you work for, you no longer work at the old company, you work at the new company, no matter what anyone says.

It is very profitable from the engineers perspective to keep insisting you work for Slack as long as possible though. If you just immediately roll over you’ll lose your old culture and benefits immediately.

I don't really agree. Different parts of a single corporation can have different culture even if they arose entirely internally. And ownership does not imply there is no operational autonomy. It's all just people, and people make the culture and the rules and decide how to run things.

Consolidation is killing us all.

> they sure as hell didn't buy you because of your culture.

They bought the company and tech. The company built the tech the way it did because of the people, and the people found the best way they operate. If salesforce wanted to have a salesforce built product they would have done that, but they bought slack. who’s to say if slack would be successful if the people are forced to act like salesforce?

I’ve been involved in very awkward hiring situations where I apply for a job at “Salesforce,” only to be told at the last minute “you’re OK working at the ‘Slack’ team, right?”

And then I’m stuck with both “Salesforce” and “Slack” emails, and have to use “Salesforce” and “Slack” Slack channels.

Sort of yes, sort of no. If the acquired business is operating effectively and doesn't have a bad quarter or two sometimes the acquirer is happy to let it run more or less independently for a while. Sure, the writing is on the wall, but you can go years without major impact as an IC.

I just had a sudden moment of clarity where I think I grokked massive tech companies slightly more, when I tried to picture 70k employees on a single Slack server.

How does that work? I imagine they don’t all pile into one server. Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

I experienced 2-3k employees on a slack server. it was terrible. 99% of the traffic is noise, 1% was critically important information for me to do my job.

> Do you just have zero organic connection to 99% of your colleagues?

They aren't really your colleagues in the sense you're thinking.

Companies that big get broken up into departments or business units that function pretty close to separate businesses (until you get to the top of them, then it merges back a bit). Those are your colleagues, and most of the people you interact with.

Those 70k wouldn't all be on the same channel. Even at a small company you might want to have distinct channels with different purposes - maybe #sales, #sw-engineering, #announcements. A 70k-person company might have a few large channels but most of the activity would take place in much more focused channels, of which there would be thousands or tens of thousands. A software team of a dozen people might have their own channel, for example. (Actually, in my experience we had several for distinct purposes.)

(and of course yes, there can also be big general-purpose channels with a lower signal-to-noise ratio)

The 70,000 are all forced into #general. However it's a moderated channel of dubious utility.

sounds like you're talking about a specific company, or is this just a general Slack thing I've forgotten? by 'forced' do you mean they aren't able to create channels at-will?

Slack also has Enterprise Grid, which super-huge companies use to divide into not just separate channels, but separate Slack "servers" entirely.

When I was at IBM, they had...uh...a lot of them.

That’s a very accurate summary of where I work at the moment. All the nice things were said, but everything that made us what we were is being destroyed piece by piece.

> The second Salesforce bought Slack, Slack ceased to exist

I'm pretty sure it could be sold, thus it exists. Or used to exist and could exist again?

> So Salesforce makes all the same promises, but at the end of the day there's reality.

> And all those promises about Slack being independent and autonomous? Well sure, that was the plan

Do you think you and I know this pattern but the executives of Salesforce and Slack don't? It wasn't the plan, it was lies; they knew what was going to happen.

Very eloquently put.