Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

I think there is a button to “Snooze suggested posts in feed for 30 days”

I have a somewhat inside scoop from working with various early Keyhole employees, and my impression is that they were generally happy with the acquisition. At the very least, quite a few of them stuck around long past the golden handcuffs stage.

You know, I finally uninstalled instagram on my phone after yet another disappointment with the mobile app.

It may not be entirely related to the acquisition, but they have been focusing much more on "stories" lately over pictures, and the text is an afterthought.

The final straw for me was trying to highlight some text on a "video post" that explained what the heck I just saw, to expand it, or copy it to search for something, and I realized I just couldn't. Instead, every time I tapped on the text, the Instagram app was certain that that gesture meant I wanted to jump disconcertingly to the next photo/story. I tried to go back, and it would start playing the previous video with the elided text teasingly at the edge of the screen, and then when I would try to expand it, it would jump to the next one again.

I'm sorry, but Instagram has completely gotten away from its roots, and the app has been corrupted by some pathetic attempt to drive engagement or whatever it is management thinks is important

Agreed, that was a legendary acquisition.

That being said, I think it was not a mistake for the previous owner(s) to sell at the time. Priceline had cash, and the marketing heavy ("buy ads in January, stay in summer, bill hotel at the end of the month after the stay") business had significant cash flow challenges in terms of growth.

When I joined in late 2010, Booking still seemed to be viewed as a bit of a poorly understood miracle by the group folks, growing nearly 2x every year. Certainly the engineering department was so much less... corporate... than the mothership's that we were sometimes referred to as the cowboys in Amsterdam.

Shortly thereafter, they hired Darren Huston to run Booking, who relatively soon after that (like 24 months? I'm sure Google search will find that answer) also became the group CEO, all based in Amsterdam. At the latest then, Booking would have been officially the core of the company, even though it had been the growth motor for well longer.

Historically, the benefits offered by Priceline group to booking were IMO chiefly aforementioned cash flow for growth, and shared technical infrastructure (WAN, shared colo space). Booking had outgrown the group infrastructure team's ability to scale. The perpetual culture clash eventually led to the central infrastructure group being broken up (very much an outcome driven by the booking CTO, Brendan Bank). So we built our own network and DC team since we had far, far outgrown the infrastructure needs of other group companies.

For a long time, Booking was so focused on only doing things that were strictly measurable and attributable that we didn't do any brand advertising or classical marketing (cf. quantitative fallacy). We co-grew with Google search ads in particular and had built very significant tooling around AdWords since the Google provided infrastructure didn't scale. Unofficially, we were the largest ads customer for a long time spending billions annually at useful ROI. This "stealth mode" meant that we weren't getting a lot of DDoS type threats to deal with for example and likely less fraud risk. It also meant that we always chuckled in earnings calls when analysts praised the "Priceline business being very successful overseas". Eventually reality caught up and PCLN became BKNG - Booking Holdings.

'twas a wild ride. Not always fun but chock full of learning.

AMA if you like.

Github actions. Word on the street is that all DevOps personell moved to the GH actions team (which to me dosnt really sound reasonable btw) to bring it up to DevOps parity. Autopilot, those web based dev stations, mermaid integration ...