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Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

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Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#441

Post by achillesheels »

danielmarkbruce wrote: post #428
achillesheels wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are abstracting the personnel too much from your analysis. Clearly Apple, for example, persists and thrives in a world with such dynamism. The difference is one of talent, and the internal organization therein.

They were 1 in 100 in a new (gigantic) game - smart phones. Sometimes an existing company will win. They happened to have a good set of people with the right skillset for the new game (phones basically became mini computers) so maybe it was really 1 in 5, but it wasn't a sure thing they would win in the new game. And I'll bet $1 they won't win in the next new game and everyone will lament what happened to the $3 tril…

They created the game.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#442

Post by fargle »

endymi0n wrote: post #216
rjzzleep wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean sure there is "some" truth to it. But more likely than not the acquiring company has two conflicting priorities: 1. acquire startups/talent to improve certain things that the company is incompetent at 2. actively block efforts from the startup because a certain part of the company actually believes that they are doing things better themselves, i.e. ego I advised a big US car maker on their autonomy and one par…

...or commonly phrased by my ex manager when I loudly complained about something as "love it, change it or leave it". It was a hard truth to swallow, but rationalizing it, I quickly realized all other reactions to adversity are pretty pointless indeed. There are people who thrive in large orgs and then there's others... eventually I realized there's simply no way I'll ever make peace with bureaucracy. I can stand bri…

run, hide, fight

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#444

Post by randomswede »

Let me guess, someone at some point said Sarbanes-Oxley? Under that restriction, the team running the app must not have access to the app's codebase. And the team writing the app must not have access to the production configuration (and tooling for production).

There's a whole bunch of other things that go into SOX compliance and is something that one should only pursue if required.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#445

Post by Joeri »

sokoloff wrote: post #313
Joeri wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Setting up teams for inner source work can be done and tends to earn itself back, but most teams aren’t set up for this. Typical solutions for the issues you mention: trusted committers to review and merge work without having that role burden the whole team, contribution guidelines to set standards, 30 day warranty to avoid getting code dumped in their lap that’s broken but also avoid having too many owners of parts…

Interesting and I’d love to hear more about this “30-day warranty” concept. How’s that work in practice and how do you use it to avoid having too many owners? (Does it revert to the original system owners after 30 days?)

The full explanation is on the inner source patterns website: https://patterns.innersourcecommons.org/p/30-day-warranty

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#446

Post by rmetzler »

kortex wrote: post #295
_tom_ wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now you understand modern book marketing. :-)

Wait...are you suggesting that whole comment is actually just an ad ?

This is not an ad and I doubt it is fake. Click on the user profile and read some of his other comments. This guy is real.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#447

Post by rmetzler »

milkytron wrote: post #5

This happened to me too. Small company, very fast paced, learned new tech very quickly for two years and actually pumped out awesome products (in addition to other small company perks). After the acquisition, the way we worked completely changed for the worse. I ended up leaving and so did about 50% of the developers. Promotions became much more difficult to achieve, raises were below or only matched inflation, and p…

I've been on two companies which got acquired by much larger companies.

I understand that some things need to be standardised for an enterprise.

But what I hate is that the acquiring company often tries to totally change the company they bought. They bought the company because they did something well, why don't they try to learn from that instead of forcing their system on the new people?

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#448

Post by silexia »

The bottom line is that mergers and acquisitions destroy companies. Removing the founder and reducing the power of key executives destroys the soul of a startup. Almost every company I have seen be acquired by a larger company has died.

Founders, don't sell your companies. An exit is not the goal. Your business is our baby, what monster would sell his baby?

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#449

Post by femiagbabiaka »

mbrodersen wrote: post #436
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if your startup ever makes it to any sort of scale, it will likely have the same problems -- they all do :)

SpaceX seems to do just fine?

do you work there? would be interesting to hear how you believe it's different and why. if not, then I think "just fine" is probably conjecture, and I'd imagine they have the same problems as everyone else at scale.

Re: Ask HN: Startup acquired by a large company and it sucks. What to do?

#450

Post by throwaway44222 »

If you are Brazilian, this is how i felt working at TOTVS, it's absolutely a living hell to get anything done, you have to spend days trying to figure out managers, convince people that have no incentive to be efficient, and just like OP i tryied to do my job on my own and was denied for compliance reasons, i just cant understand this type of behavior
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