37Signals have a very clear "Getting acquired by big companies is the worst mistake you can make" stance. I'm not sure where it comes from, but they seem to thi

37Signals have a very clear "Getting acquired by big companies is the worst mistake you can make" stance. I'm not sure where it comes from, but they seem to think that anyone who gets acquired by a big company will regret it. They say the same things about getting VC funding. They, themselves, have successfully bootstrapped and are making tons of money and have not gone down the acquisition route and, the best I can tell, that's the basis for their argument. Despite their ongoing campaign, they do not and cannot say which acquisitions will turn out well and which will turn out poorly, so they seem to default to the stance that everything will turn out poorly, but that's simply not true. They also make one big error in arguments against acquisition: It's a short-term perspective. You're not tied to the startup that acquires you forever. You can leave any time. And many great startups have been started by people whose first company was acquired and that acquisition gave them the financial freedom to start a second company under their own terms (I don't think their founders have much in the way of second company founding experience). Great founders don't have just one idea, they have many. And they execute them. Twitter? FourSquare? etc. Yeah, their prior startup acquisitions by Google might have not been a good fit for one reason or another, but has anyone bothered to ask the founders if, in retrospect, they're glad they did it? My acquisition experience was amazing. I had offers from multiple companies and I picked the one that matched-up best to our company culture instead of optimizing for potential future value -- turned out to be a good decision because not only did we have a blast, but the company that acquired us took us from literally zero pageviews per day to 20 million per day (back in 1999 -- that was a lot back then and still is!). And the value of the company that acquired us increased 10x over the next couple of years (the company is no long around in it's previous form and its stock did crash during Bubble 1.0, but everyone walked away happy). So when you read anything from 37Signals that states, in one form or another, "acquisitions are bad" and "venture capital is bad," then take it with a grain of salt.