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Comment by jrowley | Hacker News Reader

It’s really sad to see companies like google buy companies like nest, or more recently amazon and eero. These little companies build fantastic devices, then the companies get acquired and the elegant products get mutated to serve their new owners. Finally a new player enters the market and the cycle continues.

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What's sad is that those companies accept. I have been offeredd job interviews at google and facebook and politely refused.

Yes, millions are a much bigger temptation, but you still have a choice. In the hand, either they decided those companies where matching their ethics, or they gave up on ethics for money.

Given our entreprenarial culture, is that surprising ?

In the case of Eero, I think they just knew it was surrender or be killed in another year or two. They were already starting to face heavy competition.

Eero was VC funded, right? That means they're basically forced to exit unless they think they can keep growing quickly.

(I used to share an office building with Eero's early team. They seemed nice.)

I agree, and I'm not saying they should have done otherwise.

I'm saying it's still a choice.

We, sadly, prefer one option to the other.

Or maybe there is a third option we don't see.

A job interview is just a smidge different than a life changing $3.2 billion for a company that only raised $80 million.

No doubt. I don't pretend I would have made a different choice.

Yet it is still a choice. It's just a question of how much your values are worth.

Don't forget that all your investors that took that chance on you want their return too. It is different than one person who bootstrapped and can do whatever they want. When you take someone else's money, you have a legal and ethical responsibility to them.

I think you're assuming anticapitalist values in a game played by capitalists with venture capital.

This isn't an aberration; it's the goal. Startup companies are group-funded technology incubators that, if they succeed, are consumed by larger technology holding and aggregation companies.

Often, the offer is much harder to pass. "We will buy you or we will build a better you and destroy your business" - it's not just a money offer to refuse when you think about it. Part of the decision process is also the feeling that a huge company wants to enter the market with the same product. Can you compete?

An example that went the other way? Snapchat. Facebook just made their own.

Suunto still exist after garmin and samsung entered the market.

It is possible. Not saying it's easy, but it's still a choice.

The we still make the choice to give the bullies more power in the end.

Those companies accepting these offers is often the goal-state of creating the company in the first place.

This is the flow of the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem.

If the little company with a fantastic device did not really have a business model besides eventually getting bought out they have been working for one of the big five (or whatever the current count is) from day one, they just did not know which one exactly.

I often think, and i may be completely wrong here, that these little companies (Nest) get acquired with the intentions of the larger company (Google) to be as hands off as possible. You don't want to screw up the little companies culture.

However, what i think happens is that you see a headline "Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion" but the reality (again, i'm assuming here) is that in order for Nest to get that $3.2 billion, they need to reach certain sales goals. So now the little companies drive ends up being to reach sales goals.

So i'm not sure the elegant products get mutated so much to serve the new owners, i think the acquired company gets mutated to cash out.

Its not like Nest wasn't making some pretty horrible mistakes with the product before they got bought. There's a fair number of stories about the device failing, frozen pipes, and the like.

If you believe nest became more like Google, you clearly never met Tony.

At least in that case, you have it very very backwards. Nest made Google more like Nest, not the other way around.

I think it's fair to say most people reading this comment haven't met Tony. I don't mean to be excessively demanding, but maybe you could share some more specific insight because I'm genuinely curious what you mean.

I agree. FB + oculus rift

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