Have been acquired/acquihired a few times. Universal. Some holding company you've never heard of but probably have spent quality alone time on their primary website. Activision. General Electric. Accenture.

The distractedness of the executives is spot on. But it always seems to be in hindsight that we look back and go "huh, funny..." I am sure we could write an inference bot that monitors the calendars of people in the organization and estimates that an acquisition is imminent.

And the security/bug fixing. "Yeah, that bug has been there for three years, nobody has time to fix it." Well, all of a sudden, we are fixing it. And more besides. And the licensing of software and source code. Getting a full run down of every open source license, and I mean _every_ license, and then going back and checking them again. A sudden drive to document everything.

I've also seen the ugly side of acquisition too. An equity claw back that happened to me many years ago that I am still sore about. Sudden acceleration of equity grants and a "re-interpretation of what 'it' means" or extreme scrutiny of whether you actually qualify for the equity in your contract. I've seen a few good people suddenly not get anything because there was a missing signature on a document even though the person had been at the company three years.

Large amounts of acquisition money does strange things to people.