zlacker

Often it happens that VCs buy out companies from funds belonging to a fresh because the selling fund wants to show performance to their investors until "the big one", or move cash one from wealthy pocket to another one.

"You buy me this, next time I save you on that", etc...

"Raised $19 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures + $7 million"

"Today, Bun makes $0 in revenue."

Everything is almost public domain (MIT) and can be forked without paying a single dollar.

Questionable to claim that the technology is the real reason this was bought.

>>rvnx+(OP)
If it was an acquihire, still a lot less slimy than just offering the employees they care about a large compensation package and leaving the company behind as a husk like Amazon, Google and Microsoft have done recently.

>>raw_an+J1
Is it? What's wrong with hiring talent for a higher salary?

You have no responsibility for an unrelated company's operations; if that was important to them they could have paid their talent more.

>>KK7NIL+S2
From the acquirer’s perspective, you’re right. (Bonus: it diminishes your own employees’ ability to leave and fundraise to compete with you.)

From an ecosystem perspective, acquihires trash the funding landscape. And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward. But that isn’t relevant if the individual pay-off is big.

>>rvnx+(OP)
It's an acquihire. If Anthropic is spending significant resources, or see that they will have to, to improve Bun internally already it makes a lot of sense. No nefarious undertones required.

An analogous example off the top of my head is Shopify hired Rafael Franca to work on Rails full-time.

>>JumpCr+Sa
> And from the employees’ perspective, as an investor, I’d see them being on an early founding team as a risk going forward.

Every employee is a flight risk if you don't pay them a competitive salary; that's just FUD from VC bros who are getting their playbook (sell the company to the highest bidder and let early employees get screwed) used against them.

>>KK7NIL+Ng
> Every employee is a flight risk if you don't pay them a competitive salary

Not relevant to acquihires, who typically aren’t hired away with promises of a salary but instead large signing bonuses, et cetera, and aren’t typically hired individually but as teams. (You can’t solve key man problems with compensation alone, despite what every CEO compensation committee will lead one to think.)

> that's just FUD

What does FUD mean in this context? I’m precisely relaying a personal anecdote.

>>JumpCr+Eh
> aren’t hired away with promises of a salary but instead large signing bonuses

Now you're being nitpicky. Take the vesting period of the sign on bonus, divide the bonus amount by that and add it to the regular salary and you get the effective salary.

> aren’t typically hired individually but as teams.

So? VC bros seem to forget the labor market is also a free market as soon it hurts their cashout opportunity.

> What does FUD mean in this context? I’m precisely relaying a personal anecdote.

Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Your anecdote is little more than a scare story. It can be summarized as: if you don't let us cashout this time, we'll hold this against you in some undefined future.

>>KK7NIL+S2
You want those people specifically. To get them, you need to hire them for a lot more money than you pay your current folks. That causes a lot of resentment with folks and messes up things like salary bands, etc.

But since they own equity in the current company, you can give them a ton of money by buying out that equity/paying acquisition bonuses that are conditional on staying for specific amounts of time, etc. And your current staff doesn't feel left out because "it's an acquisition" the way they would if you just paid some engineers 10x or 100x what you pay them.

>>KK7NIL+S2
I left out the part that the motivations for the acquirers were not to save money or to be slimy. It was the only way to get around overzealous government regulators making it harder to acquirer companies.

>>KK7NIL+aj
> Now you're being nitpicky. Take the vesting period of the sign on bonus, divide the bonus amount by that and add it to the regular salary and you get the effective salary

These aren't the same things and nobody negotating and acquisition or acqhihire converts in this way. (I've done both.)

> Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. Your anecdote is little more than a scare story. It can be summarized as: if you don't let us cashout this time, we'll hold this against you in some undefined future

It's a personal anecdote. There shouldn't be any uncertainty about what I personally believe. I've literally negotiated acquihires. If you're getting a multimillion dollar payout, you shouldn't be particularly concerned about your standing in the next founding team unless you're a serial entrepreneur.

Broader online comment, invoking FUD seems like shorthand for objecting to something without knowing (or wanting to say) why.

>>KK7NIL+S2
Who should be paying the founders more? The ones that made a deal with the VCs? They would be hired away from the company.

>>JumpCr+AE
And the secretary, sales, project managers, etc who get left behind because the founders and key people were taken away? In an acquisition, they may still be let go. But they also would make money from their equity