| Yes! I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. We were much more confident about our product and we had investors chasing us but we still took the offer. It's been the best career decision of my life. In the end it came down to this: the acquirer was going build the thing we were building anyway, and it had a much larger chance of success if we just went and built it for them. It also gave me two really valuable things for my career: 1) A successful exit to brag about 2) Learning so much more about building startups than I would have in my own company (the acquirer went from 25 to 250 employees while I was there) Financially, a way to think about it is that a more established startup is more likely to succeed than your startup, so if you guess some likelihoods of each succeeding and multiply it by the value of your stake in each company, you can see what your outcome of each decision might be. For us, this calculation made it obvious we should join. A tip, which bit me in the ass: try and negotiate getting some real stock as payment. We took stock options to simplify the deal, which if you've read enough of HN, you know why they're a PITA. Give all the cash to the investors (if you're getting a good salary that doesn't matter anyway) then for your payment try and get them to exchange share-for-share stock in your company with stock in their company. In theory this isn't a taxable event (in UK law at least, but i am not an accountant) so you don't have to deal with all of the stock option bullshit. (Well, for some of your shares anyway. You'll probably still get normal employee options too.) Good luck! Email's in my profile if you want any more advice. |