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Acquihires doesn't have necessarily the sole purpose of hiring new employees. Take a look at Facebook buying Face.com, Face did create a technology that was int
by rcamera 14y ago
Acquihires doesn't have necessarily the sole purpose of hiring new employees. Take a look at Facebook buying Face.com, Face did create a technology that was interesting for Facebook, it wasn't just the employees in which Facebook had an interest on. The tech now belongs to them, and they can use it to improve their own, or even replace it. Better than that, the original Face team can now work with the Facebook's team that was working on face recognition software, cooking up new and better ways of doing that. Of course there are risks here of the teams not meshing together well, but this is all analyzed and decided upon before the acquihire.
Other than that, acquihired employees aren't necessarily interested in being hired the other way. When inside a company, you have to climb the hierarchy ladder, you won't be hired after college to just be the leader of a big team, or the CEO of the company. For the people not interested in climbing the ladder, building a startup and being acquihired is a very good way of hacking the ladder and landing right on top, or close to it. I recommend pg's essay on this ( http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html ) This, together with the fact you have already mentioned that these acquihired employees have proven the ability to create something, reduce the employer's risk on selecting the wrong person to do the job, making acquihiring a good investment opportunity.
- robfitz 14y agoThis isn't accurate. An "acquihire" is, by definition, purely about the people. Face.com was an acquisition, not an acquihire (or talent acquisition). As for retaining the acquired folks, you usually pay out their earning over 4 years rather than all at once. So if an acquired founder leaves after a year, the acquiring company keeps 3/4 of what they ought to have paid to that person.
- rcamera 14y agoDisagreeing on a definition without giving better arguments than just stating I am wrong, then adding a comment on how companies retain the acqhired employees (which had already been discussed in other comments in the thread) is a very poor comment. Replace the Face example by the Sparrow example, being acqhired by Google. Acquisitions are about profits, Google's acqhiring certainly wasn't for Sparrow's profits, they bought them for both the team AND the technology they developed. They made Google's product better, and Google wanted to use both of these things to make their product even better.
- joshu 14y agoHe was pretty specific about the way in which you are incorrect. Acqhires are acquisitions where the primary interest is the team, not the IP or product.