UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
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Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#2I read the title and immediately thought to myself "What about a startup that just becomes a successful business, does that need an acquisition to breed more startups?"
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#3I read the title and immediately thought to myself "What about a startup that just becomes a successful business, does that need an acquisition to breed more startups?"
Those businesses are awesome and I think more people should build them.
The point I wanted to make in the article is that most startups are a high-risk experiment. A side effect of that is that most of them will fail and you need a lot of liquidity to fund that failure-level.
I wish more developers would just create 1-5 man businesses that make $100k-$2M/year. It's exactly the right thing to do as an individual but it doesn't sustain a startup culture it just sustains a set of solid, long-term businesses.
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#4Amusing that Autonomy is listed as an acquirer, given how desperately they had to be acquired themselves.
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#5This is a case where the TechCrunch headline is a lot more reasonable than the HN one. I read "You need an acquisition culture to sustain a startup culture" and thought it was going to be an article about how a business's culture should be primarily about acquisition, which was a little more outlandish.
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#6This is a case where the TechCrunch headline is a lot more reasonable than the HN one. I read "You need an acquisition culture to sustain a startup culture" and thought it was going to be an article about how a business's culture should be primarily about acquisition, which was a little more outlandish.
It's actually just a case of Techcrunch allowing more characters than HN. Unfortunately the full (and I agree very good one) didn't fit in.
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#7This is a case where the TechCrunch headline is a lot more reasonable than the HN one. I read "You need an acquisition culture to sustain a startup culture" and thought it was going to be an article about how a business's culture should be primarily about acquisition, which was a little more outlandish.
It's actually just a case of Techcrunch allowing more characters than HN. Unfortunately the full (and I agree very good one) didn't fit in.
"You need" -> "UK needs" would work I think
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#8You need successful exits for a startup culture, you don't necessarily need acquisitions and therefore tax breaks for acquisitions would be a mistake
What about the other path - why don't successful UK startups go public on the AIM? In the UK, companies can go public for much smaller market caps than they ever would in the US.
The UK is not burdened with the bureaucracy of Sarbanes–Oxley, so the UK doesn't necessarily need to adopt the US' cultural shift to stay private as long as possible.
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#9Great post Nixey!
Re: UK Needs An Acquisition Culture To Have a Sustainable Startup Culture
#10This article is UK-specific, but I'm personally concerned about the same problem in the US. There's a limit to how many great startups can be built if they are dependent on M&A for exits/liquidity events, and the larger companies don't start buying more startups. Also, competition on the M&A end will lead to lower exit pricing, which will eventually impact valuation and early stage investment.
The improvements in early stage investment in recent years may just wind up throwing other parts of the system out of balance.