If you offered me 10x sales and $0.7B for a company I owned or managed, I'd absolutely take it and I don't blame Supplyframe in the least for selling.
How Siemens plans to get that value out is utterly beyond me, so I'd have some questions on the buyer side, but the seller side makes 100% sense to me.
Most high-tech startups have a significant percentage of their stock held by their employees, though I don't know if that was the case here; Torrone's note about hackaday's history suggests otherwise.
It's one of these typical German conglomerates that absolutely doesn't understand consumer and consumer products. I don't know if it will mismanage Hackaday. They literally only have to keep it as is. But if they don't(mismanage) I'll be positively surprised.
Their twitter messages quoted in the Adafruit blog imply that they don't know what they bought :-)
"Thank you for reaching out @adafruit. @Hackaday und @Tindie are websites of @Supplyframe, and thus also part of the acquisition. Hackaday in particular is a community exchange website for engineers and developers. "
(no need to explain what Hackaday is to Adafruit.. probably they don't know who Adafruit is either.)
Seems more like an innocent mix-up by the social media PR person, who likely isn't familiar enough with the properties to notice the mixup between Hackaday and Tindie at the end there.
Or they could have been referring to Hackaday.io rather than hackaday.com.
That's exactly the problem. The Siemens Press Office employee doesn't have the domain knowledge of what Adafruit and Hackaday are that would be common knowledge to end users of their products, or would be if they, like their users would, bothered to do a cursory search before replying.
These German megacorps put so much procedure and so many layers between the people who build stuff and the people who use it that it's impenetrable. You can get a Siemens sales guy in the office by just mentioning you might buy something, but when he gets there he can only parrot the information off the glossy brochures. You have to go through him to talk to the applications engineer. The apps engineer has a cursory knowledge of typical uses of the product, but when you actually need some details, they have to call their technicians in the lab. That tech can try it but can't offer any guarantees it will continue to work, they'll have their manager contact a manager of the domestic Siemens engineering office, at which point you finally get to the guy who worked on that product. But it turns out he only translated the English version of the manual, there's no way to reach the guy who wrote the original in German.
The inevitable result of all that communication friction just to answer a basic question is that the company representatives can't tell a good idea from BS. You need that to keep scams off of Tindie, submarine marketing and pseudoscience off of Hackaday, and in general build stuff better than the discrete companies that the megacorp slowly amalgamated.
"typical German conglomerates"? Funny expression. You mean, like the three or four there are in total? Why does it matter that it's german? And how does this differ from a typical "us conglomerate", or "chinese conglomerate" or "tajikistani conglomerate"? I am smelling some resentments and stereotypes right over there ...
How Siemens plans to get that value out is utterly beyond me, so I'd have some questions on the buyer side, but the seller side makes 100% sense to me.