
To Sell or Not to Sell: Silicon Valley Acquisitions Market Heats Up - bpung
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/141/to-sell-or-not-to-sell.html
======
jasonlbaptiste
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.

~~~
netcan
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.

------
vaksel
it seems like an easy decision to me.

get out as soon as you get your FU money. Once you have the FU money, you can
afford to continue gambling with startups.

The web is littered with thousands of startups that were once "hot", you gotta
quit while you are ahead.

~~~
bumblebird
Sounds like bubble gambling talk to me. I'd rather make something a bit more
lasting.

~~~
netcan
If you owned a 'hot' company in the bubble & decided to 'make something a bit
more lasting,' you probably went bust. Those that got out, won.

If you think that the market is too hot, what you are saying is that startups
are overvalued. If you hold an asset you believe is overvalued, you should
sell it. Holding overvalued assets because they wil be even more overvalued
later is bubble talking.

BTW, I'm not saying there is a bubble. Just reacting to the commentator's POV.

------
aditya
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 board, he
told a commenter that Yahoo has "killed a lot of good startups, wasted a lot
of engineers' time, etc." In summation, he added, "I wish I hadn't sold
[Delicious] to them."_

~~~
joshu
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.

------
gamble
I think you have to see acquisitions like an organ transplant. It takes a lot
of effort to keep the host from killing the transplant and even the best
efforts can fail. It's the rare success that should be surprising, not the
failures.

------
strlen
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?

