Acqui-hires seem to me like a Silicon valley thing. I have not heard of them being done anywhere else. Where I come from, if your product is in decline and you

Acqui-hires seem to me like a Silicon valley thing. I have not heard of them being done anywhere else. Where I come from, if your product is in decline and you have a talented, well-known team, prepare to get poached. Acqui-hires seem like favours between investors to me. In SV the concentration of investors and companies is so high, which means that the overlap in deals is also high. So an investor in Acquirer A pushes for a soft purchase of Startup X, knowing that there's a high likelihood Startup X's investors point him to a sweet deal in the near future.