3 ms·

Seems like they could just steal a lot of info and then build their own version through this process

cs02rm0 4y ago
Does seem odd to expect to share code early and a risk to share it with any interested party. I mean, it's someone else's code, your engineers are going to say it's rubbish, it needs a full rewrite and throwing away, warn us up front before you even think about acquiring such terrible code, etc. But if it's a built a company to the point of raising sufficient revenue/profit it's surely good enough.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  It is. Normally you only do that after you agree on the terms and that means there is a deal unless something horrible is found during DD. And if your code is terrible simply disclose it then likely the requirement will go away. But if you claim it is super good but you only have juniors on staff you can expect to be quizzed.
jacquesm 4y ago
Yes, this happens. So be very much on your guard about this and make sure that you trust whoever you talk to and if you can't trust them then you can ask a trusted party to do the review for you and pass that to whoever claims to be interested. There are many variations to this kind of 'vendor dd', you can prepare it beforehand or you can push to have the process modified until it is to your liking depending on how desirable you are.
WJW 4y ago
Not that that never happens, but engineering time is not cheap even at Gitlab scale. Even if you manage to recreate the product based on the insider info it's still a risky process; new products fail all the time, especially if they are new entries in an already filled market. It's much quicker and often not that much more expensive (after you tally up all the engineering and marketing costs and adjust for the risk of failure) to acquire a company that already has a working product, customers, marketing, documentation and usually you get a team of domain experts included in the purchase.

Does seem odd to expect to share code early and a risk to share it with any interested party. I mean, it's someone else's code, your engineers are going to say it's rubbish, it needs a full rewrite and throwing away, warn us up front before you even think about acquiring such terrible code, etc. But if it's a built a company to the point of raising sufficient revenue/profit it's surely good enough.

jacquesm 4y ago
It is. Normally you only do that after you agree on the terms and that means there is a deal unless something horrible is found during DD. And if your code is terrible simply disclose it then likely the requirement will go away. But if you claim it is super good but you only have juniors on staff you can expect to be quizzed.

jacquesm 4y ago

Yes, this happens. So be very much on your guard about this and make sure that you trust whoever you talk to and if you can't trust them then you can ask a trusted party to do the review for you and pass that to whoever claims to be interested. There are many variations to this kind of 'vendor dd', you can prepare it beforehand or you can push to have the process modified until it is to your liking depending on how desirable you are.

WJW 4y ago

Not that that never happens, but engineering time is not cheap even at Gitlab scale. Even if you manage to recreate the product based on the insider info it's still a risky process; new products fail all the time, especially if they are new entries in an already filled market. It's much quicker and often not that much more expensive (after you tally up all the engineering and marketing costs and adjust for the risk of failure) to acquire a company that already has a working product, customers, marketing, documentation and usually you get a team of domain experts included in the purchase.