First time, we all got our options exercised immediately (worth pretty much nothing for non-founders/investors) and retention+severance plan based on how critic

First time, we all got our options exercised immediately (worth pretty much nothing for non-founders/investors) and retention+severance plan based on how critical to company you were. Just about all the "strategic" execs bounced and it had pretty much zero impact on the company. Most of the people responsible for the company's success stuck around for several years after. The parent company invested a lot into us, which lead to significant rapid expansion in both staff and technical projects and investments which let to record company financial growth and pretty much exceeded projections and expectations constantly. At the same time, they let us be almost completely independent since they didn't quite understand the formula to our success and didn't want to mess with a good thing; we could use parent company resources whenever it was beneficial or sensible, or not when it wasn't. Some of the things we used to outsource got transferred to our parent company to do in-house (payroll, legal, HR), some of their relevant business divisions got transferred under our operational management. Our compensation and benefits were adjusted to be more market competitive than startup pay. Morale was mostly good and most people settled down, had kids, bought property or very expensive toys. Biggest cultural change was that we had to actually do our job well and make money instead of constantly throwing parties on VC money. Then our parent company got acquired and by extension we did too. Not even a remotely half-baked idea on what to do with us or our parent company. Grandparent company started meddling immediately without remotely understanding how the business functioned. Significant layoffs at both the parent and grandparent company. Multi-year hiring, compensation, and promotion freezes. Most of the founders were forced out. Forced down changes to core business technology to match their technology. Not a thought given to employee retention or business continuation. We pretty much had half the staff voluntarily leave in the following half year, which might be more attrition than the entire decade of company lifetime combined. Morale is pretty much in the gutter and the bleedout doesn't seem to to be stopping anytime soon. We pretty much flipped from a healthily profitable and growing division to one that's on the verge of collapse overnight. Plus side is our parent company negotiated an excellent severance clause for their employees, which lead to borderline sabotage by people in the parent company in hopes of getting severance instead of being forced to stay under the grandparent company. Pretty much best case scenario and worst case scenario of what you'd want after an exit.