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What happens after Yahoo acquires you

37signals.com

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Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#81

Post by TY »

tptacek wrote: post #59
hartror wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have some examples of where that has worked in the medium - long term? (i.e longer than the 2-3 year mark most of these founders have bailed out at) I am guessing it can work but founders/entrepreneurs aren't necessarily the best managers and are likely to get bored and be looking for their next startup. As a new owner of a company it seems to make sense to transition the senior management to people who are mo…

Sure: IMDB, Audible, and Zappos. Also, the issue isn't that the founders leave; it's that the energy does. Founders are always going to leave.

Interestingly, all of them purchased by Amazon.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#83

Post by tomkarlo »

hartror wrote: post #62
tptacek wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure: IMDB, Audible, and Zappos. Also, the issue isn't that the founders leave; it's that the energy does. Founders are always going to leave.

But isn't that the issue? The energy tends to come from the founders so how do you reliably transition away from the founders, whether it is without full company integration or not?

Regardless of whether you get acquired or not, if you build a company that won't persist without your individual presence, the process is still incomplete. (And what you really have is a vehicle for your individual talent.) Any company that's supposed to last more than a few years must be build so that it can handle key people leaving, because that's what people always do in the long term, one way or the other.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#84

Post by jackowayed »

wheels wrote: post #70

Hmm, for some reason they forgot to include: You sell your company for $50 million in Yahoo stock, which over the course of your two year tenure at Yahoo will see a tenfold increase in value up to $500 million and your team will use that wealth to go on to create a disruptive seed-stage funding group called Y Combinator. Must have been an oversight. I can't imagine 37signals only telling half of these stories to make…

Wow, did their stock actually 10x between when they got there and when they sold it?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#85

Post by kscaldef »

brisance wrote: post #79
wheels wrote: post #70

Hmm, for some reason they forgot to include: You sell your company for $50 million in Yahoo stock, which over the course of your two year tenure at Yahoo will see a tenfold increase in value up to $500 million and your team will use that wealth to go on to create a disruptive seed-stage funding group called Y Combinator. Must have been an oversight. I can't imagine 37signals only telling half of these stories to make…

That was a really long time ago, at the beginning of the dot-com craze. On the contrary, in the last 5 years, YHOO share prices have declined about 50%. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#chart2:s...

Sure, but there's also 2003-2005, where the stock increased several fold. It matters a lot where you pick your start and end points with tech companies in the last 15 years.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#86

Post by InclinedPlane »

democracy wrote: post #76
InclinedPlane wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because creating software is a creative endeavor that requires talented and skilled individuals working imaginatively. Timesheets and other bureaucratic overhead are poisonous to that process. The best software can't be created in a factory assembly line with interchangeable drones.

So the companies acquired by Yahoo created the best software? Even from the technical point of view the majority is an average project and an average team, I really don't see why someone acquired is different from the rest of the owner company.

In some cases, yes (flickr, delicious, etc.)

If you're implying that Yahoo's MO is to acquire companies and convert them into pumping out hum-drum, mediocre software, well, that sounds about right.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#87

Post by philwelch »

hartror wrote: post #58
edw519 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a right way to do this? Yes. a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary. b. Don't fuck with it.

Do you have some examples of where that has worked in the medium - long term? (i.e longer than the 2-3 year mark most of these founders have bailed out at) I am guessing it can work but founders/entrepreneurs aren't necessarily the best managers and are likely to get bored and be looking for their next startup. As a new owner of a company it seems to make sense to transition the senior management to people who are mo…

Bungie.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#88

Post by robryan »

joshu wrote: post #42
petervandijck wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you are being acquired, you could say: "We're worried about loosing our culture, which has brought us the success we've seen so far. I want to agree that our group will be allowed to set its own rules to some degree in terms of working environment." And give a few examples. No need to push it or make this legally binding, or even put it in writing. Then, when the timesheet dude shows up (which they will), just s…

The flickr people were pretty good at this. I was less so. One thing that always bugged me - when I ran Delicious, I had people submit a weekly status update (just a list of bullet points) to the entire company. That way everyone knew what was going on. We got to Yahoo, and my boss decided to kill that. When I got to Google, globally visible weekly status in bullet point form are part of the culture. I take this as v…

What's the accountability like? If in delicious case if it is to be shut down, do the execs/managers responsible for it get some kind of penalty or is it business as usual where the blame can be passed to any number of other things for poor performance?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#89

Post by alanfalcon »

gamble wrote: post #5

This article is mistitled. It should read 'What happens after anyone acquires you'. These anecdotes will sound familiar to many people who have been through an acquisition. Acquisitions are not something any company is naturally good at, and they inherently threaten the bureaucracy of the acquirer. Despite good intentions, the corporate immune system usually kills off the interloper before it becomes established. Not…

It's not what happened when Apple acquired NeXT ...

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#90

Post by jacques_chester »

jleader wrote: post #52
jmreardon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While not quite a legal requirement, at the last company I worked for the timesheet was described as something like: If we don't give the government timesheets, they don't pay us our salaries. The one before that said the timesheets were used to do reporting for R&D grants from the government.

I've worked at companies where accounting was needed to qualify for R&D tax credits, which required tracking what percentage of developers' time was spent on particular projects. My bosses at those times said something like "we have to fill these out or the company will pay more taxes, they're not for me. Make them as accurate as you can, but don't obsess over them. I'm not going use them to manage your time."

In Australia some businesses can get tax deductions of 140% for R&D time. While subcontracting to a software firm I used to fill them in for this exact reason.
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