My own experience goes like this: I was only an employee, so the motivations for selling to a parent company could be different. Yet from my angle, it was eith

My own experience goes like this: I was only an employee, so the motivations for selling to a parent company could be different. Yet from my angle, it was either, A) go for another round of funding or B) find a company that would be a natural fit for our small team and product. When such a company eventually came along, it seemed like a no-brainer deal. We can finally get the resources of the company to help us become stronger and do more interesting things with our product. They assured us they had a place for the product and believed in our mission. Once we got absorbed, things changed. They split us up into different teams and threw product managers at us. We need all of your "startup-foo" energy and creativity to help spark a fire around everyone else they told us. You can get back to your product once you help ignite our core products first. Well, after a year of this so far, we haven't had time to work on anything related to our startup at all. I think it was a fail for everyone except the founders and investors. All the original people seemed burned out already on projects they never signed up to work on. All the non-engineer folk have since left as they got really bad deals. Both of the founders at least made enough from the deal to buy amazing properties in this crazy real-estate markets so I think for them they can shrug off their original baby. In the end though, the product has fallen apart from bit-rot and engineers are slowly moving on to other companies one-by-one.