An acquisition is always a failure

No, no, a thousand times no. This is complete bullshit. I'm sorry, but you lost me at:<p><i>The proper ambition for a tech entrepreneur should be to join the ranks of the great tech companies, or, at least, to create a profitable, independent company beloved by employees, customers, and shareholders.</i><p>Nobody, not you, not my mom or dad, not "God", not Linus Torvalds, not Bill Gates, not the Queen of England, not the Dali Lama, not Zoroaster or the Easter Bunny or President Obama or the sterno bum at the corner of 3rd and Main, not Sergey Brin, not Kevin Rose, but NOBODY has any standing to tell <i>me</i> what <i>my</i> "proper ambition is." Why? Because "fuck you", that's why. You don't know me, my life, my past, my future, my dreams, my fears, my hopes, my goals or a goddamned other thing about me. Don't f%!#ng try to tell me what I ought to aspire to.<p>Say I build a company to a point where I could sell for enough that I could walk away with, I don't know, let's call it $10,000,000 USD. The other option is to stay independent and maybe, <i>maybe</i> eventually IPO. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and say "Go for the IPO, don't sell, selling is a failure". But you know what... maybe I need the money <i>right now</i> to do some things I always wanted to do. Maybe I want to buy my aging mother a new house, and I don't want to wait for a bloody IPO, I want to do it <i>now</i>. Maybe I have a family member who needs special medical care, or - fuck it - maybe I just want to cash out, fly to Scotland, and spend the rest of my life looking for a 6' tall, redheaded supermodel with a Scottish accent to marry.<p>In any case, no, you don't get to tell me that I failed, if I choose to pursue what matters to <i>me</i>.<p>Look, I get the point... I agree that - <i>in general</i> - entrepreneurs <i>would</i> want to stay independent, and <i>would</i> prefer to wait. I don't relish the idea of building a company and then selling it... but life is more complicated than that. And life is a series of tradeoffs and a constant balancing act between doing what is best for us <i>right now</i> versus what is best for the future. One is not a failure for making a rational, reasoned decision to favor one set of priorities over another.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with getting into business to make money. Nothing.<p>There is nothing wrong with discovering a problem you don't have or care about that people are willing to pay to have fixed, slugging through building something to solve that problem, and trying to maximise your profit and minimize your time. There is nothing wrong with working hard in a field you are not passionate about to make money.<p>How passionate do you think the guy soldering your alarm clock battery to the circuit board in Guangdong China is about his job? He does it to make money for himself and/or his family. Is there something wrong with choosing entrepreneurship with the hope of making a fuck ton more money than that, or are you required to take the job you can get unless you want to build a billion dollar business for shareholders?<p>Only working on something you are fully passionate about and getting paid well is a luxury not everyone can afford.<p>There is also nothing wrong with creating a non-profit to help limbless children in Cambodia, taking no salary, and spending all your time in service of others.<p>In fact, the former can allow you to do the latter, still support your family, and live well yourself.<p>I agree with mindcrime. And I wonder why so many PandoDaily writers are so full of pomp. And fuck that guy.

Pretty easy position to take once you've already earned your own "fuck you" money.<p>I do sometimes wonder why these sorts of acquisitions remain so prevalent though when minus a few notable exceptions the life cycle tends to consist of a company paying many millions or even a cool billion for some tech in a stack they don't even use (only to kill it soon after) plus a handful of employees that tend to stick around barely engaged until just long enough to unlock whatever golden handcuffs they have on.<p>Seems like way more often than not they are failures more on the side of the acquiring party though I guess there may be some valid (though ultimately unfortunate and cynical) reasons for participating like nipping a potential future competitor in the bud.

I recently sold my company and I agree with Jake.<p>What most commenters don't understand, in my opinion, is that real entrepreneurs don't start their company to get rich. If getting rich is your priority, become an investment banker (If you really want to code, make some automatic trading algorithms and financial models for investment bankers.)<p>In that regard, selling your company is, very often, a failure.<p>In my experience, the worst is to have to give up your values. As a young entrepreneurs, I started my first company 10 years ago with not only a strong vision for my product, but also an quite idealistic goal for the values of my company and my team. We wanted to be different. We wanted to do things as we thought it was right to do. And nobody could tell us what we had to do. It was such a strong feeling. It drove the success of the company. Ten years later, we got acquired by a large corporation that is not better or worse than you normal large corporation. And we had to give up all that. That's failure.

&#62; <i>With a fat bank account, I was pretty set to do whatever I wanted for a long time.</i> ... <i>But it didn’t take long to realize that my new life was a hell of a lot less exciting than running an independent company had been.</i><p>Sorry, but this is completely self-contradictory. With your fat bank account, you can start a new, independent company. If what he wants is:<p>&#62; <i>our way of thinking of a better approach to consumer tech, with less structure and more play, an exploratory mindset that, through trial-and-error, produces very tangible real-world value</i><p>Then nothing is stopping him from doing that again. In fact, he's in an incredibly privileged position.<p>Indeed, being acquired and then let go lets you focus your energies on new things, rather than being stuck maintaining old things you created in the past -- "maintaining" things being something that established companies might very well be more skilled at.<p>So, besides being needlessly inflammatory, this post doesn't even make sense inside of its own logic.

I used to think about startups in bovine terms.<p>Some startups are beef type. These are made to grow as fast as possible, increase the user base by whatever means, without care about long-term health. They hunt for investments, especially big ones. Then, the sooner the better, such a company is sold to a large company and butchered, either to be digested and feed the corporate muscle, or just to remove competition with the big company's product line.<p>Other startups are milk type. These are grown steadily and sustainably, if slowly, with great care about long-term health. They are usually become profitable early on, at least ramen-profitable. Owners usually reject several acquisition proposals, and are careful with 3rd-party investments so as not to lose control of the company.<p>I think that a milk-type company has a far better chance to be a long-term success and transform the industry. It may grow huge, like Google, or stay small, like Github or Craiglist.<p>In rare cases beef-type companies do not die within a large corporation but become an important organ (e.g. Android inside Google), or enjoy a benign neglect (e.g. Instagram inside Facebook). But usually they just die, the way the post explains, or even worse.

I'm going to guess that Jake will take a lot of flak here for this article, but the truth is: I agree with him, for a certain version of "success".<p>There are folks who will pursue money, and then an acquisition looks like a nice validation and exit. Great. No prob there.<p>But there are a bunch of folks who are satisfied when they are <i>building</i>, and any other mode feels like something is missing in life. My advice to this (my) cohort: Don't fight it, just accept that you're always going to need a project to obsess over. Odds are that project will be a <i>failure</i> but not as much as anything else that is not so much a "project" as "going to work in the morning."

Jake is brilliant, but this isn't always the case: What about Google's acquisition of Android? What about Apple's acquisition of NeXT? What about Microsoft buying 86-DOS from Seattle Computer Products? What about Lenovo's acquisition of the ThinkPad?

The "older doofuses who didn’t understand the Web" seemed to have done pretty well with CollegeHumor and Vimeo without Jake. If they had run them into the ground, I imagine he'd write an article about how being acquired is always success.

The title is too strong and this post is too black and white. Succeed forever and become a giant or fail? Not very inspiring. I like his views on visionaries and how an acquisition <i>usually</i> removes the real vision from the company but other than that, this is just a very subjective piece.

Choices you have with what to do when your startup gets successful enough to consider your "exit"<p>A) sell B) IPO C) stay the course<p>If you've taken investment at any point, especially VC, you are pretty bound to do A or B. Your investors want to see the company succeed in many ways, but they are also looking for returns at the end of the day. Large ones. So if the opportunity comes along, your board will probably make you take it.<p>So C is really only an option if you're 100% bootstrapped. That's pretty rare these days. Even if you are, the excitement, challenge, and general "buzz" you get from being a startup founder is going to pass at some point. Either the company stagnates or you get too big to be nimble.<p>The author seems to be just lamenting the passing of time, that he's not as excited and hungry as when he first started. In most cases, nothing you do is going to bring that innocence back.

I don't begrudge this author his wealth or his page views. But this piece isn't the least bit serious. Ten times out of ten, he'd take his buyout over again. The only thing that concerns me is that somebody might actually take this post to heart and destroy his or her chances of joining the ranks of the author should the right opportunity present itself.

This article couldn't be any further from the truth. How is selling a failure? What if you're selling because your marriage is falling apart or family is suffering because you're never home? What if you want to persue other ventures? What if you're sick and tired of being responsible for a business?<p>Sometimes selling is the only option for some and I can sympathise with that. Or if you invested a whole heap of effort, time and money and want to cash out purely for the money, what is so wrong about that?

Screw all y'all, I <i>love</i> this article. It's a sequence of true statements with a hard to swallow and idealistic conclusion, but it's <i>absolutely right.</i><p>The only upside to an acquisition is money. Does that often make it the right, logical choice? Of course. Put that aside.<p>Once you're acquired by a larger more beaurocratic organization, your company dies (perhaps quickly, perhaps slowly), your projects flounder or become administratively managed, your ability to innovate quickly goes away. In short, your dream dies.<p>His personal accounts of this happening are <i>on the money</i> and are not uncommon effects.<p>Facebook is a grand counterexample. Zuckerberg didn't sell out when the company was young and he was offered ridiculous buyouts because <i>facebook wouldn't exist today</i> in the same way if he had. The dream would have been killed. Far-fetched example, but maybe true.<p>Of course it's important to think about reality, of course you have to look at the real world too; of course of course of course. No one can deny you that perspective.<p>But just maybe, let all that go for one second, and think from an idealistic perspective. Be a dreamer. Don't go after the most logical realistic thing right away. Or at least consider it.<p>Because we need those companies too. We need companies that can dream, and innovate, and remain independently fueled with a common goal and a vibrant workforce. We need companies that aren't acquired because we need dreamers to think big, so the world can go somewhere better—rather than just somewhere with bigger bank accounts.

Not every business is as free-form as ones where you luck into a $100k/month business when you're just two college kids. In that scenario of course you can throw as much spaghetti against the wall as you want with total creative freedom. But most startups do not happen to be at exactly the right place at the right time like this, and it's a multi-year slog to creak into profitability, and then several more years of intense focus to actually achieve real success. If you want to cash out early to buy yourself the freedom to work on whatever you want, and you end up getting paid more than 99.999% of the world for your months of hard work, I don't see any way you can call that a failure. Even assuming no element of luck and that Jake is just one of the most naturally talented entrepreneurs alive, I still think expectations need to be re-calibrated here.

And now for a counterpoint, we turn to our next guest, Andrew Mason.

A sweeping generalisation in the title made by a tech blog is always a success.

even neglecting the money aspect entirely, this is bullshit. as a hacker, i want to build things. not "implement a vision", just build something that is useful to someone. if some larger company sees the thing i built and says "wow, this is exactly what we need to fill this gap in our product/service/lineup" and acquires my creation (with or without including me to continue developing it), i would consider that a resounding success.<p>as a real world example, does anyone think the keyhole vision was somehow killed by becoming google earth?

I didn't get farther than the headline.<p>Such a blatantly false sweeping generalization...obvious troll is obvious.<p>Why exactly is this on the front page with 115 upvotes?

This is a great article! I would say that first-time entrepreneurs should try to get a success even if it means they have to give away equity / get acquired. You can own 100% of your next business if you like, after you have millions in the bank and a track record with investors.

Of course it depends on your own goals, motivation, and the thing that gets you out of bed. If you care about your product and your audience then I think whilst it might sound promising to sell to a bigger company, there are chances your product and audience will be both gone. There are also chances of being able to reach even wider audience with an even better product.<p>I can think of a couple of examples like Picnik and Posterous. I'm not sure what those guys wanted out of it, and I hope they are happy with the decision. For me personally they were both two great products that dissolved into nothing... I'm sure there are plenty of examples to the contrary (some people mentioned other successful google product that really became huge).

&#62; my new life was a hell of a lot less exciting than running an independent company had been<p>That may partially be because he was too busy to learn what makes him happy other than work.

So, that would make Viaweb a failure?<p>I think the world is a much better place with PG &#38; Company running Y Combinator than if they had slogged on and on with Viaweb.

observation: companies get big and successful if the founder is not driven by money, but by the desire to be right (and prove it to others).<p>however, this does not mean that every companies main goal needs to be to get big. if you're driven by other desires, your style of business will follow. be aware of what you want, visualize it, this makes it far less frustrating.

Many have problems with the title. It may be interesting to note that Jake Lodwick ‏@jakelodwick stated:<p>"I wrote an article for Pando. My suggested title, “A Critique of Popular Ambition”, didn't make it."<p>ref: <a href="https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/319330932945469440" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/jakelodwick/status/319330932945469440</a>

From not seeing a headline from them in a long time, I had hoped PandoDaily was banned from HN for being so terrible.

Wish I fail every week. I dislike this rant a lot. It doesn't fit any pattern because everyone has different goals in life.

&#62;I uploaded them to blumpy.org, my crudely named personal website<p>Oddly they link to the url when it is now some Japanese site.

I'd like to fail like that too.

First of all, let me say that I hate "acqui-hires" with a passion that could summon Cthulhu. I've taken to calling them "welfare checks" because that's what they are: a socially-closed, elitist private welfare system to keep rich kids (born into the necessary investor and acquirer connections) from actually <i>failing</i> no matter how dogshit-awful their ideas are. Acqui-hires usually benefit founders but screw employees, and should thus be thought of as a "gentleman's C" for shiftless, incompetent, useless rich fucks Playing Startup.<p>Thaaaaat said, I disagree with "always a failure", at least in the pejorative sense. Let's be realistic, here. Let's first take a page from Eastern religions. Impermanence. Go here: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impermanence</a><p>All things change. And die. That doesn't mean they were without value. They contributed, and left a trace. Something that is a ghost or a fragment of a god or a cloud of electricity (depending on whom you ask) carries around a decaying corpse for 100 years. It's absurd! Everything is constantly falling apart, but the universe seems to be get slightly better each day in spite of it. Nothing in the physical world is built to be eternal. That's especially true of businesses, which are generally built to effect one economic change that is initially radical but, once proven, is taken for granted, at which point it's commodity work that will be done better when a more innovative competitor comes along. Circle of life...<p>I try to live life by the Boy Scout's rule: I win if I leave the place better than I found it. Even though my effects will live on in subtle, chaotic ways, no one's going to remember my name in 500 years. If reincarnation is true, <i>I</i> won't recognize my current name in 500 years. So...<p>Yes, if you're building a business for "Teh Exit" with the intention of making millions while leaving your colleagues stranded in brain-dead corporate subordinate roles that they'll hate, then you are, in fact, a fucking loser wankbasket and I hope you fail. Build-to-flip scene kids can choke on a taint. But this doesn't describe everyone who starts a business and ends up selling it. Sometimes, the thing generates legitimate value but proves not to have enough upside to justify the entrepreneur's continued full-time commitment... or it just gets into a state where she's no longer the right person to manage it. There are good reasons for good entrepreneurs to sell their businesses.<p>We shouldn't be looking at the mode of Teh Exit for moral guidance. That's what created this fucked-up, worthless VC-istan so-called "tech" ecosystem in the first place. Sometimes good businesses are acquired and bad ones IPO (which is just another form of acquisition). Instead of boasting or griping about ExitzLulz!!!111!!(10^large-1)/9!!, we should be focusing a return to <i>genuine value creation</i>, no matter what form it takes (and it won't always be a private-sector business). We should get back to Real Technology: solving problems that people actually care about that make peoples' lives better. And we should get back to ridiculing these well-connected (not "empty suit", perhaps "empty hoodie"?) scene kids and their marketing-experiments-called-technology, no matter how they "exit". We should drive those fuckers out of town.<p>I <i>do</i> think it is fascinating that acq-hires tend to be priced at 40-50 years of salary, given that an employment relationship only lasts 4 years on average. What does it tell us? It tells us that we, as engineers, suck so bad at marketing ourselves and negotiations that an often inconsequential third party (stone soup?) can sell us for a 10x markup. Also, it shows that large companies are ridiculously bad at discovering internal talent. The fact that Yahoo bought 17-year-olds at a panic price just indicates that their middle management filter is so bugfucked that they've given up on discovering talent, internally, at the bottom. If you have to buy a new winter coat for $800 every November, it means you need to get some order in your fucking house so you stop losing track of shit.<p>By the way, most of "social media" is not that innovative. It's just a wave of marketing experiments that uses technology because <i>almost everything</i> new is technological. Social media are the reality shows of technology. Reality shows aren't prolific because they're good, but because they're <i>cheap</i> (no actor's salaries, no writer fees). Social media startups are so common because they don't require a deep technological understanding, and because well-connected morons can CxO them, so long as they can buy a "scaling expert" at a panic price post-Series-B.<p>Let's get back to the issues that actually matter. Bashing people just because they get acquired as bad as the tyranny of Those Who Have Completed An Exit (celebrity founders) in fundraising. So let's just stop the nonsense and talk about how to direct ourselves to real work.<p>And... In-dig-nay-shun! <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtCiP8B2xpc#t=7s</a>