To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up • Hacker News Board

Re: To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up

#11

Post by joshu » Thu, Nov 26, 2009, 2:14 AM UTC

aditya wrote: post #3

I can't believe FastCompany quoted joshu from here as well. A stupid blog post from mashable using that comment is ridiculous but excusable, but FC? I wonder if they asked him if they could use that quote... One of the Valley's recent poster boys for this phenomenon is Joshua Schachter, who sold his social bookmarking service Delicious to Yahoo in 2005 for a reported $30 million. This summer, on an online discussion…

The author did not ask but did ask for an interview, which I declined (sorry Farhad.)

I would welcome a discussion of how to make acquired startups successful, though. I have a number of ideas on what goes wrong and how.

Re: To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up

#12

Post by netcan » Thu, Nov 26, 2009, 6:24 AM UTC

jasonlbaptiste wrote: post #6

I hate articles like this with a passion. It makes everyone think you'll just get acquired easily. Let's start building companies for the long term. Stop building shit that you just want to get rid of. IPOs are really complicated beasts, but I like them as an exit option, because the company keeps going. Could you imagine if facebook sold to yahoo? Holy shit, I cannot even fathom that outcome.

You are still thinking that an 'exit' is necessary. Most public companies went public because they were too big to stay private forever. There are many huge private companies in existence.

The need for an exit is basically a result of the fact that tech companies are virtually never built with the intention of making money directly.

If you hate article like this, you probably should hate exit thinking. If you hate exit thinking, you should probably hate many funding structures which require it.

Re: To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up

#13

Post by strlen » Thu, Nov 26, 2009, 7:11 AM UTC

I dislike these sorts of posts. While the likes of 37signals are very quick to point out that there are lots of benefits you can have as a founder of a small company that never "exits", they forget about the employees.

Sure, if I am founder I can sell back some of my stock to the VCs/take some money out as a "bonus"/dividends, but what about the employees who have (often) taken serious risks and worked long hours for sub-market pay?