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Comment by patrickyeon | Hacker News Reader

The acquiring company gets the entire staff (or at least everyone who comes along). Assuming the company being acquired has built up a decent product, you can see the acqui-hire as a recruiting move, where you're hiring on a group that has shown they can work together, ship product, and all the members have already been vetted by somebody else. The purchase price is really just a recruiter's fee and hiring bonus bundled together.

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And that hate their bosses' guts for ruining the thing they just spent a chunk of their lives to do and were proud of, and now it's all turned to nothing. But since they need money and they're offered too good a deal to refuse, they swallow it and get in line. I'm not sure it' the best way to acquire talent. Of course, that implies people cared about the thing they did, but isn't that the kind of people you want to get?

I've certainly seen in the past the founder give it a year or two, leave, take anyone worth taking with them and then start over doing the same thing again. Successfully too.

Well, there's one thing when the gig runs over and people look for another thing to work on. But the parent post talked about recruiting the whole team, and as it often happens, just in the middle of successful and growing project - that's the principle of acqui-hire, find somebody who is currently successful and hire them out. If it's just a team looking for a next thing after previous one run out of steam, there's no "acqui" part here since there's nothing to acquire of value, it's just a regular hire.

That's why it makes sense for the acquirer to buy. Neya was questioning why it made sense for the founder to sell.

Founders in this position usually sell because they can't raise any more money and the next best option is to shut down the company because they're out of money.

With an acqui-hire, at least you find a soft landing spot for some of your employees and your investors can tell a nicer story about one of their investments getting acquired (instead of getting shut down).

Thank you! That was insightful. Cheers.

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