I've been through an acquisition like you mention and I was shocked at how little planning our acquiring company (a big one) had done to make it successful. Onc

I've been through an acquisition like you mention and I was shocked at how little planning our acquiring company (a big one) had done to make it successful. Once the legal and finance stuff was done there was almost zero process and structure set up to ensure we would succeed. Everything was ad hoc. We ended up in a bureaucratic environment with unrealistic expectations, trying to integrate with undocumented in-house systems, unclear goals, and almost zero support. Instagram was an outlier as far as acquisitions go. They had 16 employees and massive momentum. Facebook was highly motivated to make the integration happen. They cherry picked strong engineers to join the Instagram team and drastically increase their engineering capacity.