To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up | Hacker News Reader

To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up

fastcompany.com

22 pointsbpung12 comments

I hate articles like this with a passion. It makes everyone think you'll just get acquired easily. Let's start building companies for the long term. Stop building shit that you just want to get rid of. IPOs are really complicated beasts, but I like them as an exit option, because the company keeps going. Could you imagine if facebook sold to yahoo? Holy shit, I cannot even fathom that outcome.

Think of the synergy it could have when coupled with Geocities.

You are still thinking that an 'exit' is necessary. Most public companies went public because they were too big to stay private forever. There are many huge private companies in existence.

The need for an exit is basically a result of the fact that tech companies are virtually never built with the intention of making money directly.

If you hate article like this, you probably should hate exit thinking. If you hate exit thinking, you should probably hate many funding structures which require it.

it seems like an easy decision to me.

get out as soon as you get your FU money. Once you have the FU money, you can afford to continue gambling with startups.

The web is littered with thousands of startups that were once "hot", you gotta quit while you are ahead.

Sounds like bubble gambling talk to me. I'd rather make something a bit more lasting.

the problem is that you don't know if it will last. In fact, you are almost guaranteed to be deadpooled. Whether by getting crushed by a bigger opponent(the company offering a buy out has money to burn, if they don't buy you, they'll buy your competitor) or by a savvy startup which gets lucky.

Where is Lycos? Where is Altavista? Where is Friendster? When you can't take a step without stumbling over a corpse of a rotting startup, gambling it all away in hopes that you are an exception just seems silly.

It's better to sell out early, secure your future, then once you can risk it all without ending up in a poor house, you can go all the way with your second startup.

If you owned a 'hot' company in the bubble & decided to 'make something a bit more lasting,' you probably went bust. Those that got out, won.

If you think that the market is too hot, what you are saying is that startups are overvalued. If you hold an asset you believe is overvalued, you should sell it. Holding overvalued assets because they wil be even more overvalued later is bubble talking.

BTW, I'm not saying there is a bubble. Just reacting to the commentator's POV.

I can't believe FastCompany quoted joshu from here as well. A stupid blog post from mashable using that comment is ridiculous but excusable, but FC?

I wonder if they asked him if they could use that quote...

One of the Valley's recent poster boys for this phenomenon is Joshua Schachter, who sold his social bookmarking service Delicious to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $30 million. This summer, on an online discussion board, he told a commenter that Yahoo has "killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot of engineers' time, etc." In summation, he added, "I wish I hadn't sold [Delicious] to them."

Isn't that the point of Fuck-You Money? Being able to say things like that without caring who quotes you out of context? :-)

The author did not ask but did ask for an interview, which I declined (sorry Farhad.)

I would welcome a discussion of how to make acquired startups successful, though. I have a number of ideas on what goes wrong and how.

I think you have to see acquisitions like an organ transplant. It takes a lot of effort to keep the host from killing the transplant and even the best efforts can fail. It's the rare success that should be surprising, not the failures.

I dislike these sorts of posts. While the likes of 37signals are very quick to point out that there are lots of benefits you can have as a founder of a small company that never "exits", they forget about the employees.

Sure, if I am founder I can sell back some of my stock to the VCs/take some money out as a "bonus"/dividends, but what about the employees who have (often) taken serious risks and worked long hours for sub-market pay?

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