Got a lot of reactions to my last post about acquihires (specifically, lack of them) and how that might change the approach startups take to pursuing ‘soft landings.’ Wanted to clarify and respond to some of those questions, backchannels, etc.
Appreciate the discussion – it’s why I enjoy blogging 🙂
“Worst case scenario we’ll sell to a larger startup or public company for about ~$1.5m per engineer.” Yes, this was the ‘fallback plan’ for many team in the web2 era and they weren’t wrong. Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. I was on both sides of these transactions – buying startups for Google/YouTube and angel investing in high quality technical founders. Sometimes y
Werd I/O