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Comment by Robdel12 | Hacker News Reader

I applied to neon last week and then the news broke about the acquisition. They rejected it this morning — I have never been happier to receive a rejection to an application.

This would’ve been three acquisitions straight for me and… I’m okay, they’re awful. I just want stability.

Congrats to the neon team! I use and love neon. Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

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I got hired at Kenna Security a month before they were acquired by Cisco and it was such a miserable experience that I won't work for any company the Kenna leadership are involved with, nor would I ever consider working at Cisco.

I've been through two now, and for one of them nothing much changed, and the other one I was basically lost in a stack of papers for a year. Can I ask what made the experience miserable for you?

Had personally the opposite experience. Acquisitions being one of the most interesting times to be hired into.

In a couple cases I’ve been recruited because I have a history of scaling and integrating acquisitions into companies successfully

The first acquisition I was apart of wasn’t too bad! But we were still culturally very different. So after 2 years and properly transitioning things, I bounced to another start up.

Walking into something like that is tough because the two teams sort of don’t like each other and you’re really “neither”. I’d want to make sure I was interviewed by both teams

>you’re really “neither”.

IMO, this is where the power of being hired into the situation is. No existing bias for either company and all the baggage that comes with that.

Allows a person to see the pros and cons of how things get done on both sides of the fence, and act accordingly

I've been part of an acquisition as a first-year engineering manager, during which I had to navigate subsequent two rounds of layoffs. I was also a part of the group to help restructure teams and help make calls on who to keep. Morale was terrible, and the cultures also did not gel at all.

It led to some serious burnout and I took several months off. I'm now happily working as an IC again.

> Really hope this doesn’t change them too much.

My guess is that this team gets rolled into Online Tables tech, which would make product sense.

https://docs.databricks.com/aws/en/machine-learning/feature-...

Yes, that is what i expect, too. They have been paying DynamoDB and CosmosDB for a few years now. However, Neon is not competitive latency/throughput-wise for real-time workloads, needed for high end AI (like personalized recommendations). There are a few others I would have expected like Cockroach, Aerospike, or RonDB.

what if you had joined at neon's previous valuation (whatever it was) and got a sudden payday (assuming you had juuuust enough vesting)

I was a very early employee at the other two start ups that were acquired and even with equity it was not worth it. After all the class A shares were paid out, the rest of us got little.

I mean, hindsight 20/20 here, but I would have loved the theoretical money @ 1 billion. But those are so rare and my experience in the past 15 years hasn’t matched those unicorns.

Basically I’ve come to the conclusion unless you have serious equity or you’re a founder, acquisition suck. You’re the one doing the work making these two companies come together, while the founders usually bounce or are stripped of any real power to change things.

The 1b is very likely not all cash. Probably significant portion id db illiquid equity

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