[gfodor]

Consider the potential fallout of trying to do a "hostile acquihire" -- first, you will kill the relationships with the startups investors, second, you will put the founders in a position where they are screwing their investors. Who wants to go work for a company that undermines your business relationships?

[rayiner]

People do hostile acquisitions in other industries all the time. It's just business. Indeed, it's verging on anti-competitive to have some "gentlemen's protocol" as a way to keep investors happy. You're not buying anything the investors own (the good will and IP of the company), so why should they get paid?

My guess is that Google, etc, do this for anti-competitive reasons, as a way to keep engineer salaries from getting bid up. There seems to be a cultural stigma with paying much more to some engineers than others, which is why they don't just offer everyone at the target company a $250k signing bonus to come on board instead of cashing out the target company's investors.