| > I'm a bit puzzled by the sense of resentment, since by your own description everything was going well for your company, and you decided to be acquihired instead. I said "up and to the right" and I said "investor interest". I didn't say "hockey stick" or "feeding frenzy". Like I said, startups are a repeated game. Sometimes, you weigh the options, and decide that it's better to take a small win now to strengthen your position for the next iteration. The alternative is to risk burning yourself to the ground and wind up with nothing left for the next go. > On the surface it seems like you (plural) weren't all that committed to the business after all. I've seen a number of acquihires from close range and been through one myself. It's an incredibly bittersweet experience. It's a stressful life event, that is usually at the end of a stressful period of lackluster customer or investor response, and after an intense period (read: years) of pouring your soul into a business. At various points throughout the process, four out of the five of us had severe stress-induced illnesses. When the deal closed, we celebrated. We were more relieved than we were excited. Note that lawyers suck most of the fun out of this celebration by stretching the victory out over several weeks. > you need to look at it from the point of view of the other stakeholders, not from the point of view of those who benefitted from it When we announced the shutdown our product, the overwhelming number of responses we got from users were disappointed, but congratulatory. Watching the social media and blogger buzz was thrilling. However, we got our fair share of angry folks, including a number who wanted to make their hatred for us and our new corporate overlords as public as within their power. We tried to do the best we could by all of our users: super polished data export feature, split-second response times on email tech support, phone calls to coach people through the alternatives for their use cases, and ultimately sent them some free stuff from the acquiring company. We deeply cared about the other stakeholders who didn't benefit. Bittersweet doesn't even begin to cover it. Fast forward 30 and 60 days to the final data purges and other legal bookkeeping. Some corporate lawyer sends you a cold email asking you to stick another stake in the corpse of your baby. Then the next afternoon, you spot somebody else categorically bashing talent acquisitions because they lack an understanding of what it's really like. You made some claims about it being bad for everyone. The goal of my post was to point out that it's a far more complex and nuanced issue than you'd ever understand if you've never been through one, or at least watched one from the next pod of desks over in a coworker space. |