[drewda]

In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.

To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.

To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.

[JumpCrisscross]

> In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity

I’m seeing zero significant investor overlap between VoidZero and Cloudflare.

> VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios

Very few VCs do this. Andreessen stands out as the exception.

[thethimble]

> it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.

No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.

Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.

[seanclayton]

Vite isn't a product. It's a tool. It will be succeeded if necessary. It happened to Webpack after Microsoft hired the creator, and the JS community pivoted hard. Bundlers and compilers in the JS world happen once a decade it appears.

[sophacles]

I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing.

There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.

I don't quite get the distinction...

[pjmlp]

Did you pay for the hammer with a pull request?

[senordevnyc]

You paid for the hammer. Did you pay for Vite?

[Shorn]

they will soon

[sofixa]

> No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.

A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.

And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.

[benoau]

This is the kind of problem I think only UBI solves because there is no apparent business model that can sustain ~20 employees working on software like this, they need to make at least a couple million a year to pay those people!