You're discounting the multiplicative value of the team. A lone wolf programmer, even if he/she is an ace, is pretty limited. An entire team - spanning the ent

You're discounting the multiplicative value of the team. A lone wolf programmer, even if he/she is an ace, is pretty limited. An entire team - spanning the entire stack from design, backend, frontend, etc, is many times more powerful than its individual constituent employees. High-performing teams are also extremely rare, and extremely hard to build. It's not hard to build a team that can get its shit together long enough to ship a product. It's really hard to build a team that can ship at the top of the field, consistently, repeatedly. I don't know enough about Summly to know if this is the case, but if they fit this description, then the acquisition doesn't strike me as completely ludicrous - just a little bit. Of course, this logic doesn't fly in reality because it's practically a guarantee that the slow, stodgy, MegaCorp that acquired the lean, high-performing startup team is going to stomp all over whatever it was that made them tick. I've seen this happen too many times to believe that there is another possible outcome. But it seems that every stodgy, slow MegaCorp believes they're different, and this time they'll adopt a hands-off approach and let the team work its magic. Then reality sets in, some middle manager crashes it all while fighting for his/her fiefdom, and the whole exercise is forgotten about until the next acqui-hire. Anyway, theoretically an engineer can be worth $1.5mm a year if they're in a proven, performing team that's operating a couple of standard deviations above the norm, in a competitive field. That same engineer would be worth far less if they came alone.