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There are only a handful of comments in this thread and they're already seething with vitriol. Can anyone give context? Or is this just general "Yahoo, blech,

There are only a handful of comments in this thread and they're already seething with vitriol. Can anyone give context? Or is this just general "Yahoo, blech," sentiment?

minimaxir 13y ago
There's a difference between celebrating an profitable 9-digit acquisition and celebrating a mercy buyout from a company fond of mercy buyouts. (per TechCrunch, Vizify's last raise was about $1.5M in its life with the last raise in 2012, and it's likely that their options were raise more money, get acquired, or die.)
callahad 13y ago
There's just general antipathy around acqui-hires. The team gets a nice payday, but existing customers get burned. I suspect that poisons the well for other startups as those customers become more cautious. I'm also generally uncomfortable with concentrating innovation within a small set of megacorps.
- vijayr 13y ago
  Also, your data ends up with a megacorp, who you've been carefully avoiding in the past.
- stephen 13y ago
  > The team gets a nice payday Part of my naive negative reaction to acqui-hires is that the investors/founders get more of a payday (not VC-dream 100x but I assume more than 1x) than the team really does (maybe some retention bonuses, minor bonuses from vested stock, etc.). This is basically not rewarding the investors for backing a great business idea, or the founders for great execution, but for being great recruiters. E.g. "yay, I'm/the team are awesome at my/our jobs, so my founders/investors get a huge 'referral bonus'...and I get to go work at Yahoo..." (Granted, if the acquirer only wants the founders anyway, and the rest of the engineering team is more of a tangential bonus, I guess it makes sense. Perhaps this is usually the case anyway? Not sure.)
  - smm2000 13y ago
    My friend was recently ac qr - hired and he definitely did not see big payday. It was slightly better offer than what he would have got as a regular new hire but only slightly. Value of his options (after working for 3 years) was less than 10k.
    - stephen 13y ago
      Ouch.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  The thing I have noticed is that there usually seems to be a lack of humility towards the customers that are being burned in these kind of write-ups. It is all happy sunshine, rainbows and unicorns and no mention of the trouble they are causing to people who use the service. It kind of smacks of "Thanks for signing so that we could get noticed by big company, so long chumps!" I also worry about the well poisoning. It is almost like a lot of start-ups are not being run as companies but as portfolios to demonstrate skill for aqui-hiring.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

There are only a handful of comments in this thread and they're already seething with vitriol. Can anyone give context? Or is this just general "Yahoo, blech," sentiment?

minimaxir 13y ago

There's a difference between celebrating an profitable 9-digit acquisition and celebrating a mercy buyout from a company fond of mercy buyouts. (per TechCrunch, Vizify's last raise was about $1.5M in its life with the last raise in 2012, and it's likely that their options were raise more money, get acquired, or die.)

callahad 13y ago

There's just general antipathy around acqui-hires. The team gets a nice payday, but existing customers get burned. I suspect that poisons the well for other startups as those customers become more cautious. I'm also generally uncomfortable with concentrating innovation within a small set of megacorps.

vijayr 13y ago
Also, your data ends up with a megacorp, who you've been carefully avoiding in the past.
stephen 13y ago
> The team gets a nice payday Part of my naive negative reaction to acqui-hires is that the investors/founders get more of a payday (not VC-dream 100x but I assume more than 1x) than the team really does (maybe some retention bonuses, minor bonuses from vested stock, etc.). This is basically not rewarding the investors for backing a great business idea, or the founders for great execution, but for being great recruiters. E.g. "yay, I'm/the team are awesome at my/our jobs, so my founders/investors get a huge 'referral bonus'...and I get to go work at Yahoo..." (Granted, if the acquirer only wants the founders anyway, and the rest of the engineering team is more of a tangential bonus, I guess it makes sense. Perhaps this is usually the case anyway? Not sure.)
- smm2000 13y ago
  My friend was recently ac qr - hired and he definitely did not see big payday. It was slightly better offer than what he would have got as a regular new hire but only slightly. Value of his options (after working for 3 years) was less than 10k.
  - stephen 13y ago
    Ouch.
rurounijones 13y ago
The thing I have noticed is that there usually seems to be a lack of humility towards the customers that are being burned in these kind of write-ups. It is all happy sunshine, rainbows and unicorns and no mention of the trouble they are causing to people who use the service. It kind of smacks of "Thanks for signing so that we could get noticed by big company, so long chumps!" I also worry about the well poisoning. It is almost like a lot of start-ups are not being run as companies but as portfolios to demonstrate skill for aqui-hiring.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]