10 ms·

The “I just got bought by a big company” survival guide

104 points by randall 14y ago

jackiebo 14y ago
One thing I'd add is to learn the culture at your new company. They're probably proud of what makes them unique, and would like newcomers to embrace that.
- codemac 14y ago
  Wow. I just wrote my long response, and I considered adding a note about culture, but I'll leave it as a reply to you: Scott Weiss didn't just forget to put it in his blog post, he specifically didn't successfully implement a policy of adopting Cisco culture at the San Bruno office based on my later experiences there. The IronPorters were still called that (now 7 years later). The office had different perks, different beer bashes, and rarely knew people outside their project thus ignoring most of the BU and it's culture. I think you're completely correct, and it's a really hard thing to accomplish. He may have tried and failed, but I don't know as I wasn't there during acquisition.
codemac 14y ago
As someone who joined Cisco/IronPort (post-merger) and quit a little over a year later (2011-2012), here's my thoughts: - Cisco is closing the San Bruno office where IronPort was located. - Cisco is moving everyone who worked from San Bruno, mostly people who live north of San Mateo, down to the San Jose office for "office consolidation and simplification". Read: 10-30 minute commutes to 70-90 minute commutes. - Cisco bought Meraki a week after this "office consolidation", but is keeping the Meraki SF office open, many saw this as a slap in the face. - There is tons of technical debt, no one is lasting more than a year, and it's a toxic place to work. In my year there everyone was running away the moment they could. In one year the VP, 2 Directors in succession, Principle Engineer, two different managers I had, all but two tech leads I worked with, 4 engineers in my team of 7, all left. Many more are leaving with the office move. Cisco is essentially divesting themselves from all IronPort tech and talent, and it looks like it's on purpose. I would read this as "how Scott Weiss handled acquisition by Cisco well for himself for 2007-2009" not "how everything went well".
- jpatokal 14y ago
  That's right: the post is precisely about what the founder of a company acquired by a bigger company should do. As he stated, he was locked in for two years, so he made the best of it, then left at two years on the dot and is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
  - codemac 14y ago
    Reread his last two sentences: > Many of the best people at IronPort stayed at Cisco for many years after their IronPort vesting was over. I believe the main reason the acquisition was a success was because the team engaged and meaningfully integrated into Cisco. I stated what I stated because these sentences are a false narrative he probably just repeats to himself now. The team was not "meaningfully integrated into Cisco". I arrived 3.5 years after acquisition and they weren't even in the Cisco sales catalog! Anyone who worked there will laugh or cry when they read that sentence about being integrated. We had our entirely own data center, accounts, email addresses, passwords, office, and LLC that sent our paychecks.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- Uhhrrr 14y ago
  Probably not a slap, just waiting for Meraki's lease to run out. It's funny how Cisco walks the "networked world" walk in a number of ways (IP phones on the desks, virtual secretaries in some of the lobbies), but still wants to maintain a city-within-a-city with its attendant traffic bombs and mazes of twisty little cubicles.
  - helper 14y ago
    Meraki is moving (or just moved) into a bigger campus in San Francisco. I was under the impression that they signed their new lease after they announced the acquisition.
- brooksbp 14y ago
ghc 14y ago
Or, if you're someone like me who was non-founder employee number 1 and are pretty sure you're not cut out for corporate life...arrange to work from home as much as humanly possible. The bureaucracy of the acquiring company makes me rage, but at least nobody sees it when I'm telecommuting :)
mackey 14y ago
Two years ago the company I worked for was acquired by Oracle. There was the initial "Yay! Money!" moment, followed by months of horror and disappointment. They had to "standardize" our office which meant removing our wireless for ~6 months because ours wasn't "secure" enough. They replaced it with open wireless that required a VPN to connect to. That meant if you wanted to connect from your laptop to your desktop over wireless, your traffic was routed through some VPN gateway on the other side of the country and then back again. Not to mention that all traffic meant for external domains was routed through a proxy. Good luck trying to use skype or similar services to communicate. They didn't provide any internal solutions. The coffee was also taken away, and we were given pots of the some of the worst coffee I have ever tasted. This is while our k-cup machines sat in a closet next to the kitchen. We couldn't even bring our own k-cups to use because these were locked up. We eventually got new coffee, but it took a lot of complaining. All our email/im/phone/etc was switched to some horrible mismatch of open source or acquired products. Nothing worked correctly and everything was so slow. There was almost no integration between these either. You know the webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as their mail client. They also gave us all touch screen cisco phones that no one used because people don't use phones. I was an iOS developer, which meant that I had a Mac. My team needed a Mac mini for something, which required filling out a form that went all the way up to the office of the CEO and getting approval from some of the highest executives in the company. This only took a couple months and a few more once it got sent to fulfillment. Meanwhile on our business trip, Oracle had no problem paying for expensive meals, drinks, etc. God forbid I actually want to spend money on work. It's also a good thing my mac didn't die, because if it did, I would have to go through the same steps. I could go on for hours about how dysfunctional things were and still are (although I no longer work there, but I keep in touch with many former coworkers). The point of my post is to simply point out that all those steps on that site are great, unless you are getting acquired by a company that could care less about you as an employee and your work life.
- tchock23 14y ago
  Similar experience here... Despite repeated pleas to IT, they closed all of our network ports to be able to access our app's database or git repositories, so if we want to do anything (legitimately) we have to work from home. Brilliant!
tchock23 14y ago
I wish I had read this advice a year ago. Keeping your spirits up is really hard, particularly if you want to get going on the next business, but it's critical if you care about your team and their well being when you are gone.
saddino 14y ago
A year into my post-acquisition "stint" I find the most valuable lesson is to accept that, by design, everything about your startup culture will have to cede to your acquiring company's culture. Don't fight it; how well that transition occurs will help define the "success" of the acquisition, and as a founder you will be judged in the future (fairly or not) on how well the assimilation occurred.
jessaustin 14y ago
Maybe this is off-topic, but having worked at a Lucent acquisition in 1999, I recommend buying put options to form a straddle with whatever stock options you get in the deal. If you can expect anything from an acquisition, it's volatility. (IANAL, but this probably isn't legal if you're an executive.)
- im3w1l 14y ago
  How would you buy put options for a mini company?
  - ahi 14y ago
    If you are paid with stock of acquiring company you buy put options on that stock as insurance that you won't get wiped out if the acquirer crumbles.
    - jessaustin 14y ago
      Yeah that's what I meant; although I think typically acquirers offer bonuses in (call) options rather straight stock for those current employees of the acquired company whom they wish to retain. If you buy the corresponding put options and the acquirer tanks you won't have to wait for vesting to make money either. If the acquirer does well then maybe working for that company isn't so bad. It's very possible that the costs or terms of available options would make this unfeasible. It's just something one thinks about when all his options are underwater.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 14y ago
  Check the stock trading policy for your new company before you do this; you may not be allowed to trade in derivatives of your company stock.
chris_wot 14y ago
Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same. When I worked for EMC, they took away on-site benefits, stopped the Christmas Party, cut my pay and forced me to take personal financial liability via a corporate AMEX card. They took out the old processes, pissed off the client base with their big-company stupidity, then treated the smaller business unit as just that: a smaller business unit that was a bit of an annoyance. But hey, I had health benefits - in a country that doesn't need it. Resign while you are still on top.
- helper 14y ago
  It depends. In good acquisitions there will be retention bonuses for key employees (including engineers) if those employees stay for a certain time period (often 24 months). If the bonus is worth more than the things you lose, it makes sense can make sense to wait it out.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same. I might add a qualifier "if you get a negative vibe", but in general I tend to agree. I once worked for a small company that got bought by a medium-sized company, and things went downhill at that point. Later they in turn got bought by a huge company, and things went downhill even further. The biggest mistake of my career to date was not quitting as soon as the nature of the medium-sized company was clear, which it certainly was when the replacement contracts they wanted us all to sign came around a few days after the announcement. The second biggest mistake of my career to date was not learning from my first mistake by quitting the moment we heard about the second acquisition. It's the only time I've ever felt the need to consult lawyers and make sure everything I ever wrote was in CYA mode, even though I was dealing with managers I respected and had worked with for some time: I trusted them, but I didn't trust the company they now represented not to force them to do something against my interests that they would never have chosen to do voluntarily. That kind of environment is toxic for all concerned.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Acquisitions are curious things. Its rare to know all of the variables involved. I had personal experience of a company that was acquired in order to buff the image of the acquiring company with the desired outcome of "no one else starts a company in this space for the next few years." Nothing about the people being acquired, or the technology used. Just send a message that the Gorilla was in this space and don't bother trying to create a company here. It was all very meta and pretty sad. And successful sadly. At some point someone said, "We can make this 'problem' go away for $X, ok lets do that."
zbruhnke 14y ago
I'd say this advice is spot on, in a much smaller manner I experienced a similar problem and I became such a nuisance to the company who had bought my company that they actually granted my vesting nearly two months early so I would leave the company. I was miserable. I went from being the guy who made decisions to being a "regional manager" which to me meant I sat on a LOT of conference calls. I think the final straw for me with the C-level execs at the company I sold to was a conference call that went like this: Call with 40+ managers discussing company wide budget figures. Second conference call of the day and the 6th of the week. It was Wednesday. "So, do we have any ideas on cost cutting techniques that we could employ while still keeping our company as a whole working together?" One guy chimes in about a rebuild of the company's intranet, another mentions having more folks visit our company's data center on a regular basis to understand what they can provide. My suggestions ... "Hey guys .... Why don't we just get off the fucking phone??!" ... ... Crickets. Now in retrospect this was terrible. I embarrassed the CEO and the CFO and more importantly myself, but looking back now I know the reason is because I was not happy with the position I took. I had very little freedom in my job(something i was not at all used to) and I directly oversaw almost no one meaning that I had very few people to share tips or tricks with which was one of the things I had enjoyed most at my office. I would have probably been happy training new management, or doing just about anything other than what I was doing, but it was not something I'd ever considered. Taking the time to consider what you really want out of an acquisition and fighting for it is certainly worth it, no one wants to be the guy sitting around counting his days.
codeonfire 14y ago
I'm not sure who Scott is writing to as almost no one is in this situation. Though, if you are in this situation, just having yourself put in charge of a big division is not always feasible either. If you are not a CEO or owner of the company being acquired, your survival guide is to find a new job immediately, like immediately after the all hands announcement.
lukego 14y ago
I worked in a 20-person startup that was acquired by a big telco right before the dotcom burst i.e. under trying circumstances. I've come to think of this as rather well handled. For the most part we kept our own office, culture, internet connection, and sense of identity. From my perspective as a humble engineer it felt like we were an independent OEM supplier to the mother company. We had fun and produced good products for about 5 years.
peteridah 14y ago
This is one reason I have remained a contractor - I simply will not live my life absorbing company BS; I have honed the survival skill of detecting downward spirals early and quiting responsively.

104 points by randall 14y ago

One thing I'd add is to learn the culture at your new company. They're probably proud of what makes them unique, and would like newcomers to embrace that.

codemac 14y ago
Wow. I just wrote my long response, and I considered adding a note about culture, but I'll leave it as a reply to you: Scott Weiss didn't just forget to put it in his blog post, he specifically didn't successfully implement a policy of adopting Cisco culture at the San Bruno office based on my later experiences there. The IronPorters were still called that (now 7 years later). The office had different perks, different beer bashes, and rarely knew people outside their project thus ignoring most of the BU and it's culture. I think you're completely correct, and it's a really hard thing to accomplish. He may have tried and failed, but I don't know as I wasn't there during acquisition.

codemac 14y ago

As someone who joined Cisco/IronPort (post-merger) and quit a little over a year later (2011-2012), here's my thoughts: - Cisco is closing the San Bruno office where IronPort was located. - Cisco is moving everyone who worked from San Bruno, mostly people who live north of San Mateo, down to the San Jose office for "office consolidation and simplification". Read: 10-30 minute commutes to 70-90 minute commutes. - Cisco bought Meraki a week after this "office consolidation", but is keeping the Meraki SF office open, many saw this as a slap in the face. - There is tons of technical debt, no one is lasting more than a year, and it's a toxic place to work. In my year there everyone was running away the moment they could. In one year the VP, 2 Directors in succession, Principle Engineer, two different managers I had, all but two tech leads I worked with, 4 engineers in my team of 7, all left. Many more are leaving with the office move. Cisco is essentially divesting themselves from all IronPort tech and talent, and it looks like it's on purpose. I would read this as "how Scott Weiss handled acquisition by Cisco well for himself for 2007-2009" not "how everything went well".

jpatokal 14y ago
That's right: the post is precisely about what the founder of a company acquired by a bigger company should do. As he stated, he was locked in for two years, so he made the best of it, then left at two years on the dot and is now a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
- codemac 14y ago
  Reread his last two sentences: > Many of the best people at IronPort stayed at Cisco for many years after their IronPort vesting was over. I believe the main reason the acquisition was a success was because the team engaged and meaningfully integrated into Cisco. I stated what I stated because these sentences are a false narrative he probably just repeats to himself now. The team was not "meaningfully integrated into Cisco". I arrived 3.5 years after acquisition and they weren't even in the Cisco sales catalog! Anyone who worked there will laugh or cry when they read that sentence about being integrated. We had our entirely own data center, accounts, email addresses, passwords, office, and LLC that sent our paychecks.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
Uhhrrr 14y ago
Probably not a slap, just waiting for Meraki's lease to run out. It's funny how Cisco walks the "networked world" walk in a number of ways (IP phones on the desks, virtual secretaries in some of the lobbies), but still wants to maintain a city-within-a-city with its attendant traffic bombs and mazes of twisty little cubicles.
- helper 14y ago
  Meraki is moving (or just moved) into a bigger campus in San Francisco. I was under the impression that they signed their new lease after they announced the acquisition.
brooksbp 14y ago

ghc 14y ago

Or, if you're someone like me who was non-founder employee number 1 and are pretty sure you're not cut out for corporate life...arrange to work from home as much as humanly possible. The bureaucracy of the acquiring company makes me rage, but at least nobody sees it when I'm telecommuting :)

mackey 14y ago

Two years ago the company I worked for was acquired by Oracle. There was the initial "Yay! Money!" moment, followed by months of horror and disappointment. They had to "standardize" our office which meant removing our wireless for ~6 months because ours wasn't "secure" enough. They replaced it with open wireless that required a VPN to connect to. That meant if you wanted to connect from your laptop to your desktop over wireless, your traffic was routed through some VPN gateway on the other side of the country and then back again. Not to mention that all traffic meant for external domains was routed through a proxy. Good luck trying to use skype or similar services to communicate. They didn't provide any internal solutions. The coffee was also taken away, and we were given pots of the some of the worst coffee I have ever tasted. This is while our k-cup machines sat in a closet next to the kitchen. We couldn't even bring our own k-cups to use because these were locked up. We eventually got new coffee, but it took a lot of complaining. All our email/im/phone/etc was switched to some horrible mismatch of open source or acquired products. Nothing worked correctly and everything was so slow. There was almost no integration between these either. You know the webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as their mail client. They also gave us all touch screen cisco phones that no one used because people don't use phones. I was an iOS developer, which meant that I had a Mac. My team needed a Mac mini for something, which required filling out a form that went all the way up to the office of the CEO and getting approval from some of the highest executives in the company. This only took a couple months and a few more once it got sent to fulfillment. Meanwhile on our business trip, Oracle had no problem paying for expensive meals, drinks, etc. God forbid I actually want to spend money on work. It's also a good thing my mac didn't die, because if it did, I would have to go through the same steps. I could go on for hours about how dysfunctional things were and still are (although I no longer work there, but I keep in touch with many former coworkers). The point of my post is to simply point out that all those steps on that site are great, unless you are getting acquired by a company that could care less about you as an employee and your work life.

tchock23 14y ago
Similar experience here... Despite repeated pleas to IT, they closed all of our network ports to be able to access our app's database or git repositories, so if we want to do anything (legitimately) we have to work from home. Brilliant!

tchock23 14y ago

I wish I had read this advice a year ago. Keeping your spirits up is really hard, particularly if you want to get going on the next business, but it's critical if you care about your team and their well being when you are gone.

saddino 14y ago

A year into my post-acquisition "stint" I find the most valuable lesson is to accept that, by design, everything about your startup culture will have to cede to your acquiring company's culture. Don't fight it; how well that transition occurs will help define the "success" of the acquisition, and as a founder you will be judged in the future (fairly or not) on how well the assimilation occurred.

jessaustin 14y ago

Maybe this is off-topic, but having worked at a Lucent acquisition in 1999, I recommend buying put options to form a straddle with whatever stock options you get in the deal. If you can expect anything from an acquisition, it's volatility. (IANAL, but this probably isn't legal if you're an executive.)

im3w1l 14y ago
How would you buy put options for a mini company?
- ahi 14y ago
  If you are paid with stock of acquiring company you buy put options on that stock as insurance that you won't get wiped out if the acquirer crumbles.
  - jessaustin 14y ago
    Yeah that's what I meant; although I think typically acquirers offer bonuses in (call) options rather straight stock for those current employees of the acquired company whom they wish to retain. If you buy the corresponding put options and the acquirer tanks you won't have to wait for vesting to make money either. If the acquirer does well then maybe working for that company isn't so bad. It's very possible that the costs or terms of available options would make this unfeasible. It's just something one thinks about when all his options are underwater.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
toast0 14y ago
Check the stock trading policy for your new company before you do this; you may not be allowed to trade in derivatives of your company stock.

chris_wot 14y ago

Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same. When I worked for EMC, they took away on-site benefits, stopped the Christmas Party, cut my pay and forced me to take personal financial liability via a corporate AMEX card. They took out the old processes, pissed off the client base with their big-company stupidity, then treated the smaller business unit as just that: a smaller business unit that was a bit of an annoyance. But hey, I had health benefits - in a country that doesn't need it. Resign while you are still on top.

helper 14y ago
It depends. In good acquisitions there will be retention bonuses for key employees (including engineers) if those employees stay for a certain time period (often 24 months). If the bonus is worth more than the things you lose, it makes sense can make sense to wait it out.
Silhouette 14y ago
Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same. I might add a qualifier "if you get a negative vibe", but in general I tend to agree. I once worked for a small company that got bought by a medium-sized company, and things went downhill at that point. Later they in turn got bought by a huge company, and things went downhill even further. The biggest mistake of my career to date was not quitting as soon as the nature of the medium-sized company was clear, which it certainly was when the replacement contracts they wanted us all to sign came around a few days after the announcement. The second biggest mistake of my career to date was not learning from my first mistake by quitting the moment we heard about the second acquisition. It's the only time I've ever felt the need to consult lawyers and make sure everything I ever wrote was in CYA mode, even though I was dealing with managers I respected and had worked with for some time: I trusted them, but I didn't trust the company they now represented not to force them to do something against my interests that they would never have chosen to do voluntarily. That kind of environment is toxic for all concerned.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Acquisitions are curious things. Its rare to know all of the variables involved. I had personal experience of a company that was acquired in order to buff the image of the acquiring company with the desired outcome of "no one else starts a company in this space for the next few years." Nothing about the people being acquired, or the technology used. Just send a message that the Gorilla was in this space and don't bother trying to create a company here. It was all very meta and pretty sad. And successful sadly. At some point someone said, "We can make this 'problem' go away for $X, ok lets do that."

zbruhnke 14y ago

I'd say this advice is spot on, in a much smaller manner I experienced a similar problem and I became such a nuisance to the company who had bought my company that they actually granted my vesting nearly two months early so I would leave the company. I was miserable. I went from being the guy who made decisions to being a "regional manager" which to me meant I sat on a LOT of conference calls. I think the final straw for me with the C-level execs at the company I sold to was a conference call that went like this: Call with 40+ managers discussing company wide budget figures. Second conference call of the day and the 6th of the week. It was Wednesday. "So, do we have any ideas on cost cutting techniques that we could employ while still keeping our company as a whole working together?" One guy chimes in about a rebuild of the company's intranet, another mentions having more folks visit our company's data center on a regular basis to understand what they can provide. My suggestions ... "Hey guys .... Why don't we just get off the fucking phone??!" ... ... Crickets. Now in retrospect this was terrible. I embarrassed the CEO and the CFO and more importantly myself, but looking back now I know the reason is because I was not happy with the position I took. I had very little freedom in my job(something i was not at all used to) and I directly oversaw almost no one meaning that I had very few people to share tips or tricks with which was one of the things I had enjoyed most at my office. I would have probably been happy training new management, or doing just about anything other than what I was doing, but it was not something I'd ever considered. Taking the time to consider what you really want out of an acquisition and fighting for it is certainly worth it, no one wants to be the guy sitting around counting his days.

codeonfire 14y ago

I'm not sure who Scott is writing to as almost no one is in this situation. Though, if you are in this situation, just having yourself put in charge of a big division is not always feasible either. If you are not a CEO or owner of the company being acquired, your survival guide is to find a new job immediately, like immediately after the all hands announcement.

lukego 14y ago

I worked in a 20-person startup that was acquired by a big telco right before the dotcom burst i.e. under trying circumstances. I've come to think of this as rather well handled. For the most part we kept our own office, culture, internet connection, and sense of identity. From my perspective as a humble engineer it felt like we were an independent OEM supplier to the mother company. We had fun and produced good products for about 5 years.

peteridah 14y ago

This is one reason I have remained a contractor - I simply will not live my life absorbing company BS; I have honed the survival skill of detecting downward spirals early and quiting responsively.