Airbnb Acqui-Hires Brian Pokorny And The Batch/DailyBooth Team

Batch has received some updates, but there's been a lack of new features & updates over the past 6 months, and I've stopped using it because very few people are using it.

I can't help but agree with you and think they'll be shutting down relatively soon; both have been maintained less and less, and I highly doubt Airbnb wants to let the team continue working on either of them.

There have been a number of articles about this. For some reason what pops to mind is: VC's dont really like it, Conway thinks it's good for entrepreneurs. (Who knows though, maybes there's a pretty good chance Conway is invested in both the acquirer and the acquired.)

From what I've heard, despite not liking it, VCs haven't done anything to protect themselves in the event of an acqui-hire. A lot of times the cash in an acqui-hire doesn't go to the company, but rather to the salaries of those being hired. So while a VC may have negotiated preference on the cash that results from on acquisition, they never see the cash from acqui-hire situations.

That said, I suspect it's hard for an entrepreneur to take a deal that screws their investors in good conscience, and they would make an effort to get their investors at least paid back (which still kinda screws them, but might keep things more amicable).

Edit: Regards to sharing investors, in this case they seem to share Sequoia, Conway (SV Angel), and YC, but there are a ton of others including Ignition (which led DailyBooth's A round) that aren't also invested in AirBNB.

Is this an exchange of stock primarily? i.e. airbnb gives the original investors $20M in stock or something, and cashes the founders a bit of $? I'm curious how this would work as well.