Ask HN: Tired founders facing acquihire – please advise

If you take the offer, do yourself a favor and bake some extras into your employee contract or add them into the deal. Not sure of the terms, but if you need to stick around, don't underestimate how long a year is when handcuffed. Ask for a delayed start, X% bonus and a hefty salary. Even though you didn't exit at some insane rate, you can't ignore you have a skillet or at the very least, accomplished something most have not; that's worth more than your average salary. Once you're locked in, it's a lot harder to adjust and it can leave you frustrated.

Yes!

I was in a similar situation a couple of years ago. We were much more confident about our product and we had investors chasing us but we still took the offer. It's been the best career decision of my life.

In the end it came down to this: the acquirer was going build the thing we were building anyway, and it had a much larger chance of success if we just went and built it for them.

It also gave me two really valuable things for my career:

1) A successful exit to brag about

2) Learning so much more about building startups than I would have in my own company (the acquirer went from 25 to 250 employees while I was there)

Financially, a way to think about it is that a more established startup is more likely to succeed than your startup, so if you guess some likelihoods of each succeeding and multiply it by the value of your stake in each company, you can see what your outcome of each decision might be. For us, this calculation made it obvious we should join.

A tip, which bit me in the ass: try and negotiate getting some real stock as payment. We took stock options to simplify the deal, which if you've read enough of HN, you know why they're a PITA. Give all the cash to the investors (if you're getting a good salary that doesn't matter anyway) then for your payment try and get them to exchange share-for-share stock in your company with stock in their company. In theory this isn't a taxable event (in UK law at least, but i am not an accountant) so you don't have to deal with all of the stock option bullshit. (Well, for some of your shares anyway. You'll probably still get normal employee options too.)

Good luck! Email's in my profile if you want any more advice.

He is trying to tell him not to give up. That you can fail your way to success. Can't you see that?

I did this exact scenario.

I'm way better off financially. However, I was extremely depressed for a year. I had my whole identity wrapped up in my business, and all of the sudden I had a day job again. Like everything I was just disappeared overnight.

I'm mostly through the depression, but my motivation and personal life took way more of a hit post-sale than they did during 90 hour work weeks and stressing over payroll and constant marketing of myself.

I did not have investors though, so I did wind up with a nice bank account after paying back some loans we took out. All in all, though, I still kind of regret it.