Acqui-hire means: (1) $3-6 million per engineer, with investors, founders, and executives getting most of that money. Most of these don't get rich in the VC-is

Acqui-hire means: (1) $3-6 million per engineer, with investors, founders, and executives getting most of that money. Most of these don't get rich in the VC-istan sense, but they get enough money to buy a house. Founders join Those Who Have Completed An Exit and are now seen as real human beings by VCs. (2) engineers get hired as contractors, which is a 12-month interview process with better results than the front-door process (75%, as opposed to 45% with a real introduction and sub-1% on a job site) and might make back the ~$50k they lost by working below market salary. Acqui-hire is bad but it's not quite a failure. It means the founders get paid, and the engineers get about the same payoff as they would have had in a corporate job. (Whether it's good or bad for them comes down to the assimilation process; it's usually somewhat negative.) It does, however, mean that the engineers get screwed relative to the startup promise (of being an executive, or rich, or able to do the most interesting engineering work, some day).