4 ms·

It's interesting to me that so many people in the startup community hate the bureaucracy and overall attitudes in big companies, yet for quite a lot of people,

• dayjah 16y ago
  I guess they call it bitter sweet =). Of the respondents there were only a few that had been through an acquisition; had there been more we'd have been able to draw more conclusions. From a personal point of view (heysan (YC) acquired in '09) - you're 100% right, we got our exit at the expense of some of our humanity.
• robryan 16y ago
  The exit allows you to eventually start a new startup and go through it all again, an IPO/ continuing private business means that your doing the same thing for a long time and may eventually become big company you were trying to escape from initially. I guess that would be an interesting question to pose, if your startup continued to grow would you wlecome the challenge of expanding it to more of a big company or would you prefer to jump off and do something small again? Tony Wright is a good example, leaving rescuetime to jump back into something new now that rescuetime has become a more stable, growing company.
• tomjen3 16y ago
  True, but the idea is also that they make the founders very, rich.