[gwillen]

If I think you are inclined to accept a talent acquisition if offered, I _will not use your product_. Why would I? It's insane for me to trust my data to someone who's going to throw it away to make a buck.

If you accept a talent acquisition, you will -- and should -- have a devil of a time getting customers at your next venture, having thrown away the customers from your previous one. Tread lightly.

[dasil003]

Sorry, but this is wishful thinking. Being acquihired is not going to affect any individual's future ventures in any meaningful way. You might scrutinize every new service's ownership before you click sign up, but you are not even a blip on the radar.

It might be true that overtime this will erode customer's confidence in startups in general, but so will being shut down because the founders are starving. And it's not like major corporations are guaranteeing products for the long-haul either.

Basically, the whole computer industry is one big case of buyer beware. If you really care about your data use open formats, open protocols and free software whenever you can.

[hntester123]

I agree with this statement of yours:

>Basically, the whole computer industry is one big case of buyer beware.

But not with this:

>If you really care about your data use open formats, open protocols and free software whenever you can.

Your first statement actually kind of contradicts your second - if we think of "buyer" as "user" even if the person has not bought the product - for the reason given below:

There's no guarantee that a particular free software will continue to be supported, just because it is free. Example: iText, the popular and widely-used Java PDF generation library. It was free and open source earlier but some time back got converted to a commercial for-pay product (except that, IIRC, you may be able to use it for free if you make your own product that uses it, free/open source as well).

[shazow]

Do you not get any value out of using a product while it hasn't been shut down?

Will you singlehandidly cover the developers' living expenses once the savings/investor runway is gone so that they can keep your data from being thrown away?

[gfodor]

From an outsiders perspective there is very little you can go on to decide if someone is "inclined to accept a talent acquisition." First, this is a flawed statement to begin with, because startups don't accept talent acquisitions in general, they accept a particular one. The decision is driven by the particular offer, the plan for the post-acquisition timeline, the details of the current trajectory of the business, the long-term benefits to the team, the rapport with the people they are going to be working with, and so on. It's not just about dollar signs and all acquisition offers are very, very different.