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What happens after Yahoo acquires you

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Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#4

Post by markszcz »

So what I’m getting out of this is that if your passionate about your company and its doing well, think twice before you decide to get bought out because its possible that life might not be better/greener for your company once your assimilated.

Reminds me of Brew Masters when the owner of Dogfish Head, Sam Calagione, mentioned that he had an offer to sell off his company for a nice amount but in the end he would still obsess about the fate of his company, and the name he built up for it, that it wasnt worth selling.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#5

Post by gamble »

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 to mention that the founders and best employees usually bail within a couple of years.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#6

Post by SandB0x »

I once witnessed the moment when the messenger from the new management team comes over to explain to the brilliant engineers who built the company up from nothing about these "timesheets" they need to fill in, and how it's "really not a big deal". You could feel something dying over the course of the conversation. It was one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen, and I'm sure it's far worse if you are one of the original engineers.

Is it something every acquired company has to go through? Is there a right way to do this?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#7

Post by randall »

So what do we do? Obviously this sucks, but how do we build a company and get investors liquidity without Sarbanes-Oxley-riddled IPOs or Yahoo-level-incompetent acquisitions?

Do we just keep being regular companies? Is there an alternative? How do we build things that matter (and require outside investment) and end in real change instead of just getting rich?

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#9

Post by Yrlec »

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 all boils down to the fact that scalability of an organization often is harder than scalability of a web site. Yahoo just happens to be a very good example of that.

As hackers we tend to focus a lot on technical scalability issues. We love to work on things like NoSQL, the CAP-theroem, large scale caching and whatnot. But I think that the organization often becomes the bottleneck quicker than the web site. This is especially true now when we have services like Amazon AWS and GAE which helps us with the technical scalability issues.

So next time you work on that really cool memory optimization maybe you should ask yourself if you don't get better scalability as a whole if you focus your limited programming resources on features instead (so you don't have to hire that extra programmer to do that for you, since you work on your memory optimization).

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