Lunchtime talk started to focus on money. Some people nursed unrealistic fantasies about an upward turn in the stock. Those of us who were more cynical sold our shares earlier and were happier in the long run. Eventually most of us moved on to other companies. The company is headed down the drain, but many of us are still friends. I bought a condo.

Nobody holds on to a winning lottery ticket that long. You cannot exit at the top and trying to do so will drive you crazy.

I think you and your friends were right. I had a coworker that was selling his stock as fast as he could and it finally dawned on me that he was doing the right thing. When you work at a place, you are investing your time an energy into an idea. If you hold stock in that place, you aren’t diversified.

If the stock tanks, layoffs are more likely to happen. And then you are broke and jobless. There are very few companies you can work for where your own stock is the best bet on the stock market, and second best is often pretty darn good. Gamble on a different income stream.

When it got up to around 700, he started to get frantic, figured out how to crack his own password, and sold it all.

He's from an Indian family so poor that they didn't own any books growing up, and he made in the low seven figures. But if he had known his password, he probably would have sold it early for like $10k.

Mind you, I make about 30k after tax. (Not in US)

The only people that do hold on to a winning lottery ticket that long are the people for which that $ would not significantly change their lives.

I bought AAPL at ~$20 pre iPhone, AMZN at ~$50. And sold them when I doubled or tripled my money. The only reason the choice to sell those looks stupid is hindsight. I'm still happy I sold, because I'm not independently wealthy. I used that $ for good purposes that impacted my life at the time. I cashed out for an immediate, excellent ROI instead of risking it.

Edit: If I find myself in a position at a startup where I could liquidate shares for a currently fair $ despite the strong potential for growth in value over time, I probably would, in order to de-risk the situation. I'd sell some and keep some.

Also, a middle ground is possible. Sell some of the stock for safety, and take risk with the rest.

You shouldn't bet on getting lucky.

Even to keep among the 'rich' list assuming you inherited it all takes enormous talent because money inflates away.

There may be a bigger incidence of luck (I am not sure of this either btw - almost all the contacts you get as a rich person are very much the effect of you being rich) but unless you're well prepared to take full advantage of it, there will be no returns.

What I will concede though: Luck when you're poor might mean securing a week of food. Luck when you're a billionaire probably means the stock market goes on a 15 year bull run.

There is nothing luckier than being born rich. Treating it as some sort of skill to remain rich is part of the dysfunction in US society where wealth is equated with virtue & character.

I did acknowledge the luck part in being rich. I do acknowledge it is far better than being poor. But if you want to remain rich and ensure your generations remain rich, that's a ton of work.

PS - seriously rich might mean different things for us though :)

If you are rich, but not smart -- it is hard to avoid temptation to invest into risky projects. It is hard to identify people who just want to drain away your money.

Did a lot of drugs, didn't pay attention in uni, didn't work, didn't build the habits of a successful person. Still, he got one chance after another, and in his late 20s he actually did. From what he told me, realizing how insanely privileged he is was one of the major influences for him to change.

But still, a normal person would have been long out of chances at that point, and would fight serious debt and worklessness without any support.

You maybe cannot afford to be a total wanker forever as a rich person, but you certainly have a lot more leeway in your wankiness.

Meanwhile, trading stocks on margin...

I think the FAANG people I know who supposedly make 500k/yr only got to those numbers by never selling a single share and then reporting total net worth including appreciation divided by time worked. Their base salary isn't actually that crazy. People who sell all their shares for index funds didn't do as well.

It is usually the salary + stock award that will vest over 4 years. For most companies with a flat vest, the total will come to 500k/yr for certain levels.

The appreciation is all yours. Future perf bonuses which will be each 6 months or a year are on top of this. Some companies do adjust for what you're making in that year and cut down the perf bonus (In a previous company I once got a promotion without any stock because our stock had tripled in the time...) - but these companies have a serious growth outlook. Once the stock flattens, there will be a major drain and they know this.

On average over a long period, but in this case you are invested in one company over a very specific entry date and period of time, with some critical periods blocked from selling.

Facebook peeked around the end of July 2018 at 209$, if you got stocks then you might be in trouble, or already sold out after seeing 124$ during December 2018.

But comfortably rich? You’re more likely to get there with diversification than concentration.

Whether you want to take bigger or smaller risks is up to the person in question.

However if you are already a millionaire you might as well keep holding it.

A reason why the rich can get richer, because by holding you get tax-free reinvestment of the current value. By selling you pay tax and then get to use it for something else. This plus average stock returns beating other investments or paying off the mortgage.

Exception is with crypto and 'true believers' who held and held. Maybe they'll never sell their entire stash.

I would add as well that if the acquiring company does not have a solid plan for how to integrate your team/product... you're gonna have a bad time.

Worse: if you did work there. You’re already heavily invested in other aspects of your life. Do you really want to put more eggs in that basket? The answer could be yes, but be aware of the risk.

[1] Sorry this was the first link that came up in Google: http://thepsychreport.com/books/how-incentives-hinder-innova...

It reminded me a lot of how someone goes about restoring a car. You buy three old cars. You restore one. The other two cars are parts cars for the first.

We were a parts car. We existed for a year as people were transferred to a different are or left entirely. There was nothing left but maintenance work in our group.

Our executive management was very savvy and negotiated that the acquiring company couldn't interfere with our operations for the first year in any way that could threaten our meeting the earn out goals.

The net effect was just weird. In many ways, nothing really changed for a year. In other ways, everything kind of ground to a halt because there was no motivation to do anything and no new management to steer.

I left at the end of the year.

My point is calling something illiquid worth "nil" is often silly. Maybe don't consider it worth its face value. Certainly don't go spending money you don't have yet. But automatically writing everything down to zero is dumb.

That's... isn't that impossible by definition?

The startup had a niche product in higher ed and had done a really good job cultivating their relationships with customers through top notch customer support and rapid iteration on the engineering side. Typical startup strategies for the most part.

Post-acquisition, the support team was essentially goaded into quitting by management, only to realize that the product was far more sophisticated to support than the other products in their portfolio, so they wound up having to rebuild the support team. This was when we realized upper management was a bunch of morons.

On the engineering side, they shifted our product development focus to making the entire app a bunch of SPAs because reasons. The core engineering leadership left, and the new hires that were brought in weren't as good. Apathy set in, the company started stiffing us out of promised bonuses, and I left.

What I imagine is true for both IPOs and acquisitions is that most publicly traded companies usually care a whole lot more about the bottom line than well-funded startups. Getting rid of the crazy retreats and in-house chef is one thing, but when companies start getting squirrely about compensation, it's a good time to think about what's next.

I won't comment on the current owner, because international politics forced their hand more than the typical horror story. What I will say is that they ran us very well for a long time.

All I can say is, if you like your job, like the product, and the pay is enough, stay as long as you're happy. Always give new owners a chance to fix a mistake.

A warning sign is when the parent company screws with your whatever you did to be successful. This can be as mundane as moving from git to perforce; or bypassing critical decision makers in your business critical processes. (IE, you lose control of hiring or product management.)

So enter into the process with an open mind, and keep the payout as a buffer in case you decide to give your two weeks notice and leave.

They absorbed a few employees who are still there and are just as confused as none of the tech they spent so much money on ever got used.

Maybe it was somehow a giant tax write off, or just buying out the competition?

Overall, I agree with the theories proposed in response to your post — either incompetence of their leadership or favor to an investor. In our case, it was a bit of both and the latter part was clear beforehand. Their crudely constructed plan was to take our industry data to improve their models, but they were not privy to any of it so effectively all they bought was a bunch of tech they couldn’t manage to integrate since all of our tech leads left in the first two months. That’s what they get for not providing an incentive to stay at all, which again hints at both incompetence and a favor.

Broadcast.com?

I was tasked to sell their monstrosity and it was hell. To see the faces of my clients as they looked at this 'new' platform was very demoralising for all concerned. We ended up with about 20 clients who stayed and eventually the organisation just got out of the industry segment all together, and they gave me a redundancy package.

But it sounds like sometimes the founder is fucked too.

They buy your product out from under you. They are never, ever going to be as emotionally invested in it as you were. To you it was a pet, possibly even a child. To them it’s just an asset.

How often has the product really gotten better after a purchase? Investment, sure. Bank loan, all the time. But how often to mergers result in good news for the customers? Maybe, possibly, if the products complement each other. But even Bitbucket was better off before, from a customer standpoint.

It's always about the culture. They were just corporate.

First, we are paired with the "legacy team" AKA --> You, in this case.

And mainly two things happen with the "tribal minds" of the two companies collide:

1. My peers will feel that you are X or Y and will start to be condescending with you and make your life harder;

2. Your peers will feel that we are "cheap," "foreign," and ignorant labor that will undo all the good work you did.

Because of my personal history, I can feel and see both side's views. And then I like to work with Americans and Natives more than I like my culture. (teamwork spirit is better)

Then I start to cut of the backstabbing and politics from my side, BUT I will ask and audit if you are playing fairly with us and consider and talk about the changes that will come and How can I make it easier for you[1].

If you don't play fair, I will have to enforce legal contracts and protect my company from you. If my side is not being fair, I will ask to "rotate" the team.

All the people who played fair were granted more work and more time and are right now earning more money and happier on my company or another. And I still really like them.

Conclusion: You got your badges, your war stories, and nice/elegant solutions. It was fun, but the owners need money. Nothing personal You need more challenges, and you Can Teach/Mentor better in other places. Thank you, soldier. I do hope we keep in touch because I love the way you did your terraform or scripts.

[1] - Telling management to keep you more time, more or fewer hours, Helping you dealing with backstabbing, insulating you from things and doing referrals for another jobs and whatever I can do.

The IPO was a lot of fun. We were still in charge of our own company culture. I wasn't privy to all the financial information, but we were told the company was skirting profitability and it would've been just a small push to get there. People worked harder afterwards to try to get to profitability. You also realize stock price has nothing to do with your day-to-day work - it's not in your control.

The acquisition was... well, a lot of us didn't stay. For one, a lot of people's RSU's had already vested. The acquisition meant a company cultural change. 1/3 of us left initially, some people were waiting for their RSU's to vest. I think in all, 2.5 years after acquisition, only 1/3 of the original staff is still there.

So depending on the exit, really understand what your yourself want out of life and career. It's ok to be selfish in this scenario, as not everything will be in your control, as others are also considering if they want to take large sums of money, even if it's not FYM. For being higher up on the corporate ladder, be honest and truthful to your reports. Don't make promises you can't keep.

Then our parent company got acquired and by extension we did too. Not even a remotely half-baked idea on what to do with us or our parent company. Grandparent company started meddling immediately without remotely understanding how the business functioned. Significant layoffs at both the parent and grandparent company. Multi-year hiring, compensation, and promotion freezes. Most of the founders were forced out. Forced down changes to core business technology to match their technology. Not a thought given to employee retention or business continuation. We pretty much had half the staff voluntarily leave in the following half year, which might be more attrition than the entire decade of company lifetime combined. Morale is pretty much in the gutter and the bleedout doesn't seem to to be stopping anytime soon. We pretty much flipped from a healthily profitable and growing division to one that's on the verge of collapse overnight. Plus side is our parent company negotiated an excellent severance clause for their employees, which lead to borderline sabotage by people in the parent company in hopes of getting severance instead of being forced to stay under the grandparent company.

Pretty much best case scenario and worst case scenario of what you'd want after an exit.

My latest has substantially improved the company. We're still very independent, employees made great money and now we have a strategic rudder and a patient investor that we didn't have before. In this case, our tech is very critical to their long term strategy.

If the deal is structured in such a way that there is mutual incentive for the company being acquired to continue growing, the results can be good. The necessary ingredients are to incentivize the acquired company to grow and the acquiring company to invest. If it's structured as a one-time cash-out for the founders or a financial engineering acquisition for the acquirer, it's likely a net negative.

Lets throw out some real numbers. Suppose "Small Startup" has $1M/year in revenue, is breaking even as far as expenses/profit, and is growing 30%/year.

Bad Acquisition: Pay the Small Startup founders $3M for the company.

Good Acquisition: Pay the founders $2M, and promise them 30% of revenue above $1M/year for the next 5 years. Also promise to invest an additional $3M over the next 5 years.

Usually it's a process where the company tries to push what you have into an existing product. The remaining staff support that product until the switch over happens. Some are forced to stay with option vesting deals. But usually happens over two years.

I actually prefer this arrangement over top-down employee training since it means I have more control over what I spend my time learning.

If you could learn a new work-related skill in literally zero time, most companies would be happy to pay the expenses. It wouldn't be different from buying a new chair, or a larger monitor. But if learning the skill takes a few days (forget about weeks!), in short term it means that a project that is already late would become even more late. Which is why the company totes supports investing in their human resources, but sorry, you can't get the training right now, because there are higher priorities. (Spoiler: there will always be higher priorities.)

Which is sad, because in many cases what is needed is time, not extra money. There are free tutorials, free online courses; the employees have skills they could teach their colleagues. In theory, the company totes supports employees with initiative to offer internal trainings, until they realize that this actually requires some time, too. Then you get the usual "yes, but not anytime soon". (Translation: it means "no".)

I have also seen it from the other side. At some point of my life, I was providing courses for companies.

Generally, there are companies willing to pay you for lessons of MS Word, or MS Excel. (Also Photoshop etc., but I wasn't doing those.) But with anything more complicated, time became an issue. Like, there would be a market for e.g. Enterprise Java lessons, assuming you could teach the whole thing from scratch in one day. Two days, maybe. But three days is definitely too long.

Literally, I once had a potential client asking me whether I could teach their new employees, who had zero programming skills (in any programming language, ever), make Java Enterprise applications. They gave me the checklist with dozen required topics, like web services etc. How quickly can I get my students from zero to expert? I thought about it, and concluded that perhaps in one week, I could at least tell them something about each topic; with no hope that they would remember it all, but perhaps if I also gave them detailed written notes, they would be able to reconstruct parts of it later. When I made a schedule and showed it to the potential client, they were horrified why should it take so much time; there were expecting at most three days, preferably two. At that moment I understood how much the complexity of technical knowledge is underestimated by those who make the decisions.

tl;dr - you are supposed to learn in your free time (and sometimes the company is willing to pay for it)

I'm not complaining, I was just wondering what is 'normal'.

- loss of agility in finance, HR, product development as you have to check back with the corresponding divisions of the new parent company to get aligment/green light for any kind of investment.

Worse: not being able to make independent strategic decision in these areas, but only follow orders

- restructuring of upper management that creates disquiet/uncertainty with in teams -> productivity sinks

- Parent company's sales force/marketing does not know how to integrate your product into their current portfolio/process. (Example, when a manufacturing company wants to "go digital", buys other company but their Sales has no idea how to sale digital products)

- focus shifts from "working on your product for your customers" to "integrate with their system/ their other divisions" who have no idea of your customer base.

- corporate politics takes over the decision making process

- general much more "process" creaping in, make you develop much slower. (but that does not have to always be a bad thing)

Generally though, most of not all were just thankful to not have to depend on VC. Revenue wasn’t high enough to keep the company afloat, and the value in us was largely in our established brand within the market combined with a rather active user base.

Fortunately, most everyone who was in the company pre-acquisition are still around over a year and a half later.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BaoxI75TRs

I couldn't watch that clip when it first came out. Too close to home.

That competitor was bought in the last couple of years and we all thought this would be our chance to go #1 as their head office inevitably screwed it up somehow.

That hasn't happened yet. They're still #1, we're still #2, and the gap hasn't closed. The only sign of trouble might be that their product, which was already lagging, hasn't seen a major release in that entire period.

I'm talking for personal experience from someone mid-career that moves around a lot in the industry.

The best buyout experiences are the slow embraces instead of a big bear hug. A slow embrace allows both sides to grow while they learn how to support each other. A big bear hug will suffocate the purchased company while all energy is spent assimilating instead of helping customers.

@after_the_exit can you give us a hint of this unicorn so we have more context?

Of the team we had at the time of being acquired, 2/3 have left. Some of those departures were voluntary, others because their roles were eliminated (replaced with different skill sets).

The monolith we built over 6 years continues to live, but its days are numbered, as we’re shifting new development off of the project in favor of an updated stack.

The P/E firm that acquired us implemented a different type of equity system going forward: much like death, you can’t take it with you if you leave before the next exit.

https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-acquired-you-need-to-learn-t...

Maybe because of that not much changed afterwards. There were a bit more compliance issues to deal with. We got a bit more money to spend. Recruiting became both a bit easier (known value of offer) and a bit harder (can’t sell the IPO dream anymore).

After IPO my total comp became about where it would be if I joined a large public company to begin with, so nothing especially good or bad there either.

So I guess for me all in all not much changed, just something became more explicit and known.

For an IPO I haven't been through one of those but all of my friends just basically stare at the stock price all day every day and brag to their friends about how much money their stocks are worth.

Founders sometimes have part of their pay structure tied up in retention numbers. They have an incentive to stretch the truth until those milestones are met.

The first time I was in a sale, a bunch of us had options that were worth $40k+ On paper, which isn’t amazing but for your first one out it’s pretty cool. But they couldn’t take in our culture like they said they wanted to, so it started to unravel almost immediately.

What I found out later is that there’s a kind of merger where the buyer swaps stock for your liquid assets. The founder got payed less cash than the company had in cash and accounts receivable. All that money went into payroll as the combined company cratered in slow motion. Ten months later our options were underwater, and all of that imaginary money we were going to get was lost.

By the time I had another set of options worth anything, it didn’t take much for a coworker to talk me into selling them the moment I could. Bought my first MacBook for starters, and started a love affair with a bag company. Ultimately I made more money off of the annual bonus than the stock, and got out three weeks after the bonus was paid. I put part of that money into Apple stock, which quintupled within the next couple years. And I’m still not rich.

In one, people go from owning options in their company which is private to owning options in another company that is also private. In the two companies where I have seen that happen things didn't change a whole lot but the "new way to do things" which is to say the way the acquiring company did things was sufficiently different than the way the acquired company did that there was churn.

In one the "exit" is really sort of an aquihire with no value transferred, rather the employees are all given some form of retention package depending on their perceived necessity to the success of merging in the acquired company. In those, people are typically both happy to still be working and conflicted because they now feel "trapped" as the only way to get value out of their previous investment of time into the startup is by working through their retention.

The rare, but happier version, is the one where stock options become "tradable" at some future date for non-zero amounts of money depending on the current stock price of either the acquiring (and already public) company, or the rarest where the company itself goes public.

A lot here varies by scale. At Sun I watched[1] a number of people become "overnight" multi-millionaires. Some people it didn't change at all, others became insufferable prima donas, and a number basically scaled back their work while they 'rested and vested.' A number of folks left to start their own companies (some as groups like Legato) now that they had enough money to self fund. Some, like John Gilmore, went off to do advocacy because of all the crazy stuff going on in the Crypto wars.

Bottom line is that if its a big uptick in wealth for a number of people they will all respond a bit differently. Life will be different.

For me, I came to recognize that there are many levels of "wealth"

Perhaps the first is when you have enough extra to insure your kids can go to the college of their choice (within reason I suppose). This can empower one to take some riskier bets and reap potentially some bigger rewards.

The next is when you have enough to send your kids to college and you can pay off your mortgage so that your "burn rate" is manageable regardless of your salary. This often empowers people to speak 'truth to power' since they don't really care if their truth makes those in power so uncomfortable they are asked to leave.

The third is when you own your living space outright, your kid's college is taken care of, and you have diversified the surplus into an investment strategy that is kicking off enough returns to cover your nominal burn rate (taxes, insurance, food, gas, car maintenance, home maintenance, etc). I used to talk about as being 'raman rich' much like a startup talks about being 'raman profitable' meaning that you don't have to work but not working means you might not get to take vacations or invest in other interesting endeavors.

So how your life changes will be based on both how you respond and how those around you respond to the way you respond :-).

In the first decade of the 2000's one of those Sun people who had turned into an insufferable prima dona came by looking for a job. They had mistaken (or over estimated) how much of their new wealth was because of what they did and how much of it was just luck. As a result they embarked on a number of risky startup ideas and I suspect never took anyone's advice on solving the hard problems. As a result, a string of failed startups and a trail of people who would listen to their pitch, nod politely and decline to participate. They ended up selling their house, moving to the midwest near their ex-wife's parents so that they could visit with their kids. Not a happy story.

[1] Not me though since I had started on the Monday after they went public.

Having no loans was really empowering. Even with that - it amazed me how much 'normal' living costs. We've not hit that ramen rich stage. Our kid is half way through college... and the costs are ridiculous as we will launch her with no loans as well.

It improved my life in the sense that I don’t feel the pressure of having to keep a job I don’t like: I can quit and not work for several months and nothing will happen. Even if I don’t actually quit, just the thought of me being able to do it gives me a lot of comfort. I suffered significantly from this in the past, where I was stuck in non-ideal work situations for financial/immigration reasons.

But it’s far from being truly liberating: I constantly think that a significant drop in the market could jeopardize my position (and I can’t move more than 30% to fixed income investments, since I am young enough that inflation is otherwise going to eat all my capital away), or a crazy medical emergency force me to go bankrupt (and I say this as I have a pretty good health insurance plan covered by my employer).

And, I think it would be nice to have more money for discretionary (e.g. more traveling) or unforeseen expenses.

Side note: You have the ratio inverted and probably should be thinking of the portfolio income as pre-tax.

Love my job. Team is great. Get on fine with the board, work pretty closely at times with almost all of them.

What I’m surprised at was/is the difficulty of choosing how to invest the lucky windfall capital (I diversified out as soon as I could, heard enough horror stories about not doing it), I think that it’s harder than if I’d been independently wealthy - far less room for error, fewer options and far less support from private bankers and the broader financial industry which helps people with an excess of capital. It’s going fairly well now after some time, but there was a lot more cognitive load than expected.

For me, I am facing a rebalancing of personal goals - they’ve come second to my work, and the health costs of that have been more clear over time.

At work this means I want to achieve more impact in less hours (why didn’t I think of that before?), delegate more effectively (see above), and do things with more strategic impact (which also happen to be more fun).

All of these things were in my power to do before. I’m not even sure it was the “ramen rich” thing that made the difference than having external validation during discussions with bankers and investors during the pre-IPO phase.

It’s also become clear how much the business values my work, as I’ve been navigating these changes (from “not much” all the way to “a lot” ha ha). With a lot of social capital it’s working out.

I guess that some colleagues were big shareholders. Some left fairly early on to fulfil dreams, some hung on until irritations built up enough to force a departure. Two years later, I miss nearly all of them a lot, they were my “seniors” and direct peers, replaced by talented but less battle-hardened individuals who - mostly - only have the successful pre-IPO phase as reference.

Newer, driven, engaged, staff do ask relevant questions about reward for their level of commitment which cannot be answered except in platitudes. There are more smart, enthusiastic 9-5 types who want to be part of a success rather than build a success. These people are my challenge - motivations and communication styles (meetings! goddamn meetings!) have to be different, and leadership tactics that worked need serious adjustments in the years to come.

The longer the vesting period, the more they have to lose with each decision. So they simply stop taking risks.

Within 2 years, the vast majority of the ~300 person startup I worked for had found new jobs, and if they are still there they're likely not in the same role.

We had new branding in the works, new products and a recruitment initiative that had been key to finding us very capable & motivated staff. I asked several times during the due diligence if they actually wanted all of that to continue, as they seemed a more conservative kind of shop.

Yes yes, business as usual please, came the response, who knows where it could lead. They still insisted on an earn-out clause that hinged on profitability alone.

After we signed, my whole experience of the (public) parent company was about quarter-to-quarter profitability - there was no visible technical leadership, everyone was fighting their own fires, just generally scrambling around hoping to save money or land a sale. If anything got delivered it seemed to be down to heroism, bullying or both.

After several weeks failing to meet up with other leaders in the company, I concluded that they didn't want any of my company's current developments. I emailed the CEO to say that I'd be firing about 50% of the team to save a huge number on the salary bill, and best meet the earn-out criteria, i.e. that we'd just be a cash cow and nothing more. I'd manage the transition, take the personal flak for it, and get a bonus on my way out.

These were people I liked, most lived locally and many I'd personally recruited. But I wasn't going to be naive about what the new parent company would want.

Immediately - a call from their CFO, pearls a-clutched. He was shocked, SHOCKED by my idea and emphasised it was not how things were done at the parent company. Despite the clause promising no interference in my running of the company, he was ready to veto me from doing it, with an EGM and everything. He offered to settle the earn-out early if I left early. And that was fine by me.

Two months later, they _did_ fire everyone I'd suggested, saving 2-4x what they might have paid me.

My old company is now a landing page for a vaporware product based on tech they have no expertise in.

There's not even any staff left who could debug the old platform if it broke - so they're crossing their fingers that 1/3 of the revenue doesn't disappear with a novel systems failure.

From the people who left, it sounds like a depressing, ambitionless place to work - i.e. perfectly integrated into the parent company.

Any change of control is an opportunity for some types of people, and a death knell for others, so I'm sure it's a better company for some people. Just nobody I'd respect :)

So valuable comments it's insane

I left just after the acquisition went through, because I wanted to work for a company where I could be mentored instead of swimming on my own, but I'm still friends with a lot of the people I worked with, so most of this is from an outsider looking in, but with stories from those still in the company.

The parent company swallowed the whole company, and while the product was still under the original startup name, it was built with the whole parent companies resources. While the product sadly no longer exists, they invested heavily in making sure it was a top resource, and fed into their main business.

Culturally, the place changed considerably. They went from penny pinching to giving generous budgets and perks to their employees. They were still to date the only company I've known that gave software engineers full flexitime - allowing people to work extra hours to build up extra holiday, and allowing people to take holiday whenever they wanted, with a day of notice. It all sounded amazing, but the biggest problems many of their faced was that the dev team didn't really improve. The company itself didn't have any other developers, so the same group of recent grads worked together for years. They've all left the team now, but many of them spent years working on a product without any other input. In this time, I had worked at three different companies with dozens of other talented developers, and I had learned a ton from them. Would you trade in mentorship and peer learning over insane company perks?

The last one is a negative one. The startup had several "divisions", and while the product is what got us acquired, the main money-bringer for several months was a call centre used to cold-call companies to pass on leads. They also dabbled in PPI, and other schemes from that time. We all knew that it was the product we had built that the company had wanted, and although everyone had been given new contracts at our new parent company, it became pretty clear that it was "only" the product. After a year, the owner had left the parent company to start a new venture, and mere weeks later everyone outside of the core product team that hadn't moved into other roles were made redundant. Our core product team consisted of about 8 people, in a company of around 50. A year after the acquisition was complete, only around a dozen remained.

- First, you need to find out if your department is not going to be axed immediately. A lot of functions will become redundant depending on your size (sales, HR, finance, IT are the most likely to go).

- Next, you need to find out what the org structure of the acquiring company is and how you integrate there. Each function that the acquiring company has will be replicated on your site in many cases. One example: You currently might not have a separation of product owners and project managers. If your acquirer sees these roles as different, then you will have to follow suit and people need to pick sides. Another example: If you have a regulatory department that currently reports to you as VP engineering, but the acquiring company has regulatory report into the GM/CEO whatever, then you will lose this team.

- If you can negotiate part of the post-acquisition plan, please make sure that the acquiring party agrees to grow you / your site at least to double the size. This means budget and head count (easy to forget the latter) must be allocated for the next 5 years. Otherwise you will not likely be able to hire anybody over the next 2 years, because you are not aligned to the budgetting season and head count is frozen. You need the growth just to handle all the new communication overhead you have with the acquirer.

- Resist the temptation to realign salaries and job grades too fast to the acquiring party. I have been in an acquisition where this was not handeled well. You can end up with overpayed employees who were just in the start-up for a long time and underpaid new hires. This can seriously mess things up and cause conflict among employees. Take your time and align with the new organization when everybody understands their new roles.

- Don't expect founders to stick around. They were used to running the ship and getting told what to do rarely works out unless for the vesting.

- Distance yourself quickly emotionally from "your" start-up. The likelyhood is large that the acquisition will break everything even though everyone has best intentions (compare most comments here). Don't be sad if it does.

- If you are an engineering VP now, you will likely end up as a senior manager or director. Put all your effort into being put into a director grade. Even if this is not justified normally (you need a team of 30-100 reports and/or 30-100m in sales normally to be called a director), it is much better to negotiate higher positions at the start. As many acquisitions are not allowed to scale, it might be very tough to ever be promoted for the next 5 years otherwise.

- If you can fight it, make sure that you retain on-site IT people. Corporate function are usually hell, but corporate IT is the worst.