

Ask HN: How long do founders need to stay at companies after acquisition? - Allen102

This is really a two pronged question.<p>1) How long are people typically required to stay at a company that has acquired them?<p>and<p>2) How long do people usually end up staying?
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byoung2
I suppose this varies, depending on the companies involved, the size of the
acquisition, and the reasons for doing the deal. If it is a talent
acquisition, I would imagine the goal would be for you to stick around as long
as possible (say, years?). If it is a technology acquisition, they likely only
want your tech, code, or patents, and wouldn't mind if you just stuck around
for the transition (say, months?).

When I worked at Internet Brands (née carsdirect.com), we would see maybe 20
acquisitions per year. These would be income-generating websites acquired for
an average of $1 million each. Generally, IB only wanted the site, the
community, and the impressions. They would usually keep the founder, a lead
dev, and a webmaster from the original company around for 6 months to a year
while the site was transferred in-house. We would rewrite the code in PHP
whenever possible, move the site onto our standard LAMP stack, hosted on our
servers, and migrate any blog to WordPress, static sites to MovableType, and
forums to vBulletin. Then the founder would stay on as the public face of the
site with up to a 3 year earnout based on maintaining similar or increasing
levels of traffic and revenue. After that, they usually disappear as soon as
the last earnout check clears.

