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by jonnathanson
4335 days ago
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Especially true for a bootstrapped company with no customers and no revenue. In fact, in this case I would actually wonder why the acquirer needs to do an "acquihire" at all. Perhaps that term is being misused here? An acquihire is generally a buyout of the team, not the technology, the product, or its business prospects. As the team, I would think about how uniquely skilled you are in the domain for which you're presumably being acquihired. Think about your own BATNA, but also think about the acquirer's BATNA. How many yous are out there? How crucial is your team to the acquirer's business objectives? Do you have a sense for specifically why they want you? Is it to build out a new business practice or vertical strategy? A new product? Are you better qualified to do that than the market at large? How much better? How long would it take a deep-pocketed company to assemble a comparable team? Many (most?) acquihires are indeed VC-mediated. The rest are usually because a team has managed to distinguish itself as a uniquely valuable and concentrated source of talent or domain expertise, such that finding an alternative on the open market, or building one internally, would take a lot of time, money, and false starts. In that case the acquirer's corp dev team probably has a specific calculus it uses to value acquired teams versus building new ones, multiplied in some way by the business upside of the domain or skill in question. If your team operates in a domain with major or mission-critical upside to the acquirer, expect a more generous offer. If your team operates in a nice-to-have, but supporting or uncritical domain for the acquirer, you have less leverage. |
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