To take a slightly more balanced view on it, acquiring the team and the early fruits of their research but not a market-dominating position was Cisco's growth strategy for a long long time - cherry-picking startups that had built an amazing new next-gen router or other critical appliance, or even just built the core of what would one day be one, and acquiring the team and what they'd built. Cisco then excelled at taking that from "great prototype" to "market ubiquity". You could do a lot worse.

And talent acquisitions alone aren't terrible either, at least for the founding team. They're never the home run investors hope for but they have been known to return a profit on "sunk costs" cash.