How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired? What about acquihires? Cant stop that - employees have their own agency.
> How will that work - for example Y Combinator classes. They cannot be acquired?
For the record: national economic policy shouldn't revolve around Y Combinator classes and similar startups.
I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. I'm not saying one will, but I'm saying that's a cost I'm willing to pay.
YC startups could just become mature businesses. Nothing wrong with providing a good service, earning a good profit, and employees maturing into stable careers.
I think the really important question is HOW this will happen. If you mean for the state to buy them at fair market value, nobody will object to that, not even if it closes the door to private equity.
But that's not what you're talking about, is it?
How about doing what America used to do? Provide seed funding for a new fire truck company in trade for condictions. Can we agree to do that? Fund 3 companies to make fire trucks, fast-track whatever certification and approvals they need. Create the companies we need, risking (and in fact expecting to lose) a bunch of the capital used for this.
The OP explicitly answers this: go back to pre-80s antitrust policy. Companies can be bought and sold but not if it creates concentrations of economic power that allow them to dictate prices to vendors or customers.
> Should Microsoft and Amazon have been able to buy Anthropic and OpenAI 5 years ago?
Antitrust enforcement can be done retroactively as well, if it appears that a large company abuses its financial firepower to undercut competitors or a marketshare gets too dominant.
It was absolutely actionable and implemented as policy for decades, what are you even talking about? Your phrasing pretends this isn’t exactly how antitrust enforcement worked before the much more recent approach began.
If the acquirer has too big or dominant position already in the specific sector no. They should not be able to sweep the board of all companies doing single thing.
If the acquirer attempts to acquire a startup (regardless of investor) for anti trust reasons, or there are anti trust concerns, the M&A activity is disallowed by regulators. A recent example is Figma and Adobe.
What definition of success are we using that having over $7 billion in net income after expenses in 2025, and nearly $2 billion so far this year, is "doing very poorly"?
I am not an anti trust enforcer or scholar, so I'm going to defer to experts in the field: Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, etc. That is the point of experts in a domain.
It really is sad that any disagreement with “pe is bad” means i am concerned trolling. Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce?
> Ever consider the guidelines are actually vague which is why usa keeps failing in attempts to enforce?
Your cause and effect is wrong.
The US doesn't fail to attempt to enforce, the gov representatives often get paid to not enforce by said corporations who have been allowed to put money into their campaign for election/reelection.
Don’t confuse the nature of the feedback you’re receiving here. Your comments in this thread are so obstinate and so far from this forum’s standards of good faith argument that community members can’t help but perceive you as a troll.
Nobody likes this state of affairs so we are asking you to stop strawmanning and start steelmanning the posts you are responding to.
You are clearly not dumb, so stop responding to the dumbest possible and easiest to dismiss interpretation of other people’s comments and instead go deeper
Generally you don't hold a market dominant position in any sector that anti-trust regulators care about at 15 employees?
Frankly this stuff is impossible to talk about in the abstract. The details of every individual case matters. If you're actually curious (instead of just playing a shell game), you can go look up the types of analysis that FTC does to evaluate market dominance and whether a given transaction will excessively consolidate a market.
For the record: national economic policy shouldn't revolve around Y Combinator classes and similar startups.
I'm totally fine if it turns out a sensible antitrust policy completely destroys the acquisition exit pathway for tech startups. I'm not saying one will, but I'm saying that's a cost I'm willing to pay.