
The “I just got bought by a big company” survival guide - randall
http://scott.a16z.com/2013/02/06/the-i-just-got-bought-by-a-big-company-survival-guide/
======
codemac
As someone who joined Cisco/IronPort (post-merger) and quit a little over a
year later (2011-2012), here's my thoughts:

\- Cisco is closing the San Bruno office where IronPort was located.

\- Cisco is moving everyone who worked from San Bruno, mostly people who live
north of San Mateo, down to the San Jose office for "office consolidation and
simplification". Read: 10-30 minute commutes to 70-90 minute commutes.

\- Cisco bought Meraki a week after this "office consolidation", but is
keeping the Meraki SF office open, many saw this as a slap in the face.

\- There is tons of technical debt, no one is lasting more than a year, and
it's a toxic place to work. In my year there everyone was running away the
moment they could. In one year the VP, 2 Directors in succession, Principle
Engineer, two different managers I had, all but two tech leads I worked with,
4 engineers in my team of 7, all left. Many more are leaving with the office
move.

Cisco is essentially divesting themselves from all IronPort tech _and_ talent,
and it looks like it's on purpose.

I would read this as "how Scott Weiss handled acquisition by Cisco well for
himself for 2007-2009" not "how everything went well".

~~~
jpatokal
That's right: the post is precisely about what the founder of a company
acquired by a bigger company should do. As he stated, he was locked in for two
years, so he made the best of it, then left at two years on the dot and is now
a partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

~~~
codemac
Reread his last two sentences:

> Many of the best people at IronPort stayed at Cisco for many years after
> their IronPort vesting was over. I believe the main reason the acquisition
> was a success was because the team engaged and meaningfully integrated into
> Cisco.

I stated what I stated because these sentences are a false narrative he
probably just repeats to himself now. The team was not "meaningfully
integrated into Cisco". I arrived 3.5 years after acquisition and they weren't
even in the Cisco sales catalog! Anyone who worked there will laugh or cry
when they read that sentence about being integrated.

We had our entirely own data center, accounts, email addresses, passwords,
office, and LLC that sent our paychecks.

------
mackey
Two years ago the company I worked for was acquired by Oracle. There was the
initial "Yay! Money!" moment, followed by months of horror and disappointment.

They had to "standardize" our office which meant removing our wireless for ~6
months because ours wasn't "secure" enough. They replaced it with open
wireless that required a VPN to connect to. That meant if you wanted to
connect from your laptop to your desktop over wireless, your traffic was
routed through some VPN gateway on the other side of the country and then back
again. Not to mention that all traffic meant for external domains was routed
through a proxy. Good luck trying to use skype or similar services to
communicate. They didn't provide any internal solutions.

The coffee was also taken away, and we were given pots of the some of the
worst coffee I have ever tasted. This is while our k-cup machines sat in a
closet next to the kitchen. We couldn't even bring our own k-cups to use
because these were locked up. We eventually got new coffee, but it took a lot
of complaining.

All our email/im/phone/etc was switched to some horrible mismatch of open
source or acquired products. Nothing worked correctly and everything was so
slow. There was almost no integration between these either. You know the
webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as their mail client.
They also gave us all touch screen cisco phones that no one used because
people don't use phones.

I was an iOS developer, which meant that I had a Mac. My team needed a Mac
mini for something, which required filling out a form that went all the way up
to the office of the CEO and getting approval from some of the highest
executives in the company. This only took a couple months and a few more once
it got sent to fulfillment. Meanwhile on our business trip, Oracle had no
problem paying for expensive meals, drinks, etc. God forbid I actually want to
spend money on work. It's also a good thing my mac didn't die, because if it
did, I would have to go through the same steps.

I could go on for hours about how dysfunctional things were and still are
(although I no longer work there, but I keep in touch with many former
coworkers). The point of my post is to simply point out that all those steps
on that site are great, unless you are getting acquired by a company that
could care less about you as an employee and your work life.

~~~
Xion
> You know the webmail is bad when people would rather use Thunderbird as
> their mail client.

Whoa whoa, hold it right there. Unless your webmail supports simple keyboard
shortcuts (like 'A' for archiving), threaded messages views, multiple email
accounts at once and few other useful-but-not-for-majority features, snark
statements like that are unfounded.

~~~
mackey
The "supported version" at the time we were acquired was I think 3 or
something. It was pretty awful on the Mac and OK on the PC. It got much
better, but still wasn't that great.

Right before we were acquired, my company had just upgraded to the latest
Exchange suite, including Live messaging, Round table in all our meeting
rooms, and VOIP phones. I am not a fan of MS generally, but everything worked
pretty well together. Going from that synergy to a Zimbra/Thunderbird/Cisco
Phone/Jabber chat where nothing was integrated with each other was pretty
jarring.

It also doesn't help that my current company uses google for mail, which I
think is pretty good generally and of course search is great.

------
zbruhnke
I'd say this advice is spot on, in a much smaller manner I experienced a
similar problem and I became such a nuisance to the company who had bought my
company that they actually granted my vesting nearly two months early so I
would leave the company.

I was miserable. I went from being the guy who made decisions to being a
"regional manager" which to me meant I sat on a LOT of conference calls.

I think the final straw for me with the C-level execs at the company I sold to
was a conference call that went like this:

 __Call with 40+ managers discussing company wide budget figures. Second
conference call of the day and the 6th of the week. It was Wednesday. __

"So, do we have any ideas on cost cutting techniques that we could employ
while still keeping our company as a whole working together?"

One guy chimes in about a rebuild of the company's intranet, another mentions
having more folks visit our company's data center on a regular basis to
understand what they can provide.

 __My suggestions ... "Hey guys .... Why don't we just get off the fucking
phone??!"

...

...

Crickets.

Now in retrospect this was terrible. I embarrassed the CEO and the CFO and
more importantly myself, but looking back now I know the reason is because I
was not happy with the position I took. I had very little freedom in my
job(something i was not at all used to) and I directly oversaw almost no one
meaning that I had very few people to share tips or tricks with which was one
of the things I had enjoyed most at my office.

I would have probably been happy training new management, or doing just about
anything other than what I was doing, but it was not something I'd ever
considered.

Taking the time to consider what you really want out of an acquisition and
fighting for it is certainly worth it, no one wants to be the guy sitting
around counting his days.

------
chris_wot
Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but dynamic
company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the same.

When I worked for EMC, they took away on-site benefits, stopped the Christmas
Party, cut my pay and forced me to take personal financial liability via a
corporate AMEX card. They took out the old processes, pissed off the client
base with their big-company stupidity, then treated the smaller business unit
as just that: a smaller business unit that was a bit of an annoyance.

But hey, I had health benefits - in a country that doesn't need it.

Resign while you are still on top.

~~~
Silhouette
_Just resign immediately. Seriously. If you've worked for a smaller but
dynamic company and you get swallowed by a bigger company, nothing will be the
same._

I might add a qualifier "if you get a negative vibe", but in general I tend to
agree.

I once worked for a small company that got bought by a medium-sized company,
and things went downhill at that point. Later they in turn got bought by a
huge company, and things went downhill even further.

The biggest mistake of my career to date was not quitting as soon as the
nature of the medium-sized company was clear, which it certainly was when the
replacement contracts they wanted us all to sign came around a few days after
the announcement. The second biggest mistake of my career to date was not
learning from my first mistake by quitting the moment we heard about the
second acquisition.

It's the only time I've ever felt the need to consult lawyers and make sure
everything I ever wrote was in CYA mode, even though I was dealing with
managers I respected and had worked with for some time: I trusted them, but I
didn't trust the company they now represented not to force them to do
something against my interests that they would never have chosen to do
voluntarily. That kind of environment is toxic for all concerned.

------
ChuckMcM
Acquisitions are curious things. Its rare to know all of the variables
involved. I had personal experience of a company that was acquired in order to
buff the image of the acquiring company with the desired outcome of "no one
else starts a company in this space for the next few years." Nothing about the
people being acquired, or the technology used. Just send a message that the
Gorilla was in this space and don't bother trying to create a company here. It
was all very meta and pretty sad. And successful sadly.

At some point someone said, "We can make this 'problem' go away for $X, ok
lets do that."

------
saddino
A year into my post-acquisition "stint" I find the most valuable lesson is to
accept that, by design, everything about your startup culture will have to
cede to your acquiring company's culture. Don't fight it; how well that
transition occurs will help define the "success" of the acquisition, and as a
founder you will be judged in the future (fairly or not) on how well the
assimilation occurred.

------
ghc
Or, if you're someone like me who was non-founder employee number 1 and are
pretty sure you're not cut out for corporate life...arrange to work from home
as much as humanly possible.

The bureaucracy of the acquiring company makes me rage, but at least nobody
sees it when I'm telecommuting :)

------
codeonfire
I'm not sure who Scott is writing to as almost no one is in this situation.
Though, if you are in this situation, just having yourself put in charge of a
big division is not always feasible either.

If you are not a CEO or owner of the company being acquired, your survival
guide is to find a new job immediately, like immediately after the all hands
announcement.

------
jackiebo
One thing I'd add is to learn the culture at your new company. They're
probably proud of what makes them unique, and would like newcomers to embrace
that.

~~~
codemac
Wow. I just wrote my long response, and I considered adding a note about
culture, but I'll leave it as a reply to you:

Scott Weiss didn't just forget to put it in his blog post, he specifically
didn't successfully implement a policy of adopting Cisco culture at the San
Bruno office based on my later experiences there.

The IronPorters were still called that (now 7 years later). The office had
different perks, different beer bashes, and rarely knew people outside their
project thus ignoring most of the BU and it's culture.

I think you're completely correct, and it's a really hard thing to accomplish.
He may have tried and failed, but I don't know as I wasn't there during
acquisition.

------
tchock23
I wish I had read this advice a year ago. Keeping your spirits up is really
hard, particularly if you want to get going on the next business, but it's
critical if you care about your team and their well being when you are gone.

------
lukego
I worked in a 20-person startup that was acquired by a big telco right before
the dotcom burst i.e. under trying circumstances. I've come to think of this
as rather well handled. For the most part we kept our own office, culture,
internet connection, and sense of identity. From my perspective as a humble
engineer it felt like we were an independent OEM supplier to the mother
company. We had fun and produced good products for about 5 years.

------
peteridah
This is one reason I have remained a contractor - I simply will not live my
life absorbing company BS; I have honed the survival skill of detecting
downward spirals early and quiting responsively.

------
jessaustin
Maybe this is off-topic, but having worked at a Lucent acquisition in 1999, I
recommend buying put options to form a straddle with whatever stock options
you get in the deal. If you can expect anything from an acquisition, it's
volatility. (IANAL, but this probably isn't legal if you're an executive.)

~~~
im3w1l
How would you buy put options for a mini company?

~~~
ahi
If you are paid with stock of acquiring company you buy put options on that
stock as insurance that you won't get wiped out if the acquirer crumbles.

~~~
jessaustin
Yeah that's what I meant; although I think typically acquirers offer bonuses
in (call) options rather straight stock for those current employees of the
acquired company whom they wish to retain. If you buy the corresponding put
options and the acquirer tanks you won't have to wait for vesting to make
money either. If the acquirer does well then maybe working for that company
isn't so bad.

It's very possible that the costs or terms of available options would make
this unfeasible. It's just something one thinks about when all his options are
underwater.

