> 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 as

> 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.)