Long-tail acquirers for medium exits • Hacker News Board

Re: Long-tail acquirers for medium exits

#11

Post by adventureful » Tue, May 15, 2012, 7:17 PM UTC

Every company is not going to be doing software acquisitions. Regardless of if software eats the world. The premise of the article is wrong.

It will never happen for the same reason that every company doesn't employ an army of electricians and plumbers. The same applies for duct work, air conditioning, construction, architecture, food services, and on and on. Your average company also has no interest in running their own cloud setup, or data center; they'd much rather outsource that for all the obvious reasons.

Some extremely high percentage of companies will continue to outsource their software needs, exactly as is done today. There will be no broad based software acquisition binge. It's a very difficult world to specialize in, innovate in, and manage unless software and tech is what you already do.

Re: Long-tail acquirers for medium exits

#12

Post by lifeisstillgood » Tue, May 15, 2012, 8:04 PM UTC

adventureful wrote: post #11

Every company is not going to be doing software acquisitions. Regardless of if software eats the world. The premise of the article is wrong. It will never happen for the same reason that every company doesn't employ an army of electricians and plumbers. The same applies for duct work, air conditioning, construction, architecture, food services, and on and on. Your average company also has no interest in running their…

>doesn't employ an army of electricians and plumbers.

But the whole premise of software eating the world, is its sooo prevalent, its not like hiring air-conditioning workers, its like hiring literate workers.

Writing code will be like writing essays at college and memos at work.

Re: Long-tail acquirers for medium exits

#13

Post by sriramk » Tue, May 15, 2012, 10:53 PM UTC

twelvedigits wrote: post #7

The most interesting case study would be Home Depot's acquisition of Redbeacon. Does anyone have: - acquisition price - Redbeacon's # of employees - Redbeacon's revenue - reports from members of either team on how the integration is going? (this would be the most interesting)

The rumor I heard from trusted sources is ~90m

Re: Long-tail acquirers for medium exits

#14

Post by hkarthik » Wed, May 16, 2012, 8:27 PM UTC

asanwal wrote: post #10

byoung2 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What we've seen in talent acquisition valuations we've captured is the range is large ($2-$5M/engineer). How much of that typically goes to the engineer? I imagine that a $20 million purchase of a 10 engineer company roughly works out to $2 million per engineer, but I imagine the founders and early investors would get the lion's share.

Unfortunately, don't know the answer to this as even getting the $2-5M number took us some digging. But your assumption is probably right and is only logical in that the "spoils" of an acqui-hire are not evenly distributed across the team.

It's unfortunate that there's not much info available yet, as I suspect most folks involved in these kinds of deals are tied up in non-disclosure agreements and need to wait for vesting options to expire before they can open up.

I look forward to finding out how the acqui-hires went in about 5-7 years, much like we're finding out about Flickr now.