Already, in the Valley, you will find entrepreneurs with a very clear sense of how acqui-hiring valuation is done in various sectors.
Acqui-hiring is only a problem if you are attached to specific labels.
You could say the smaller angel investors in particular, are effectively the new outsourced middle managers for big companies in the acqui-hiring market.
Incidentally, there is no more contentious topic in the startup world today than acqui-hiring, and much of the noise is caused by semantic confusion.
Founders who accept acqui-hire exits often have to agree to concessions, says Ivan Gaviria, a partner with law firm Gunderson Dettmer LLP in Redwood City, Calif.
"It looks like something good happened" for those who are acqui-hired, but it may be a "false win, " adds David Cohen, co-founder of TechStars, a start-up accelerator based in Boulder, Colo.
When startups are founded by strongly technical types, they are often explicitly designed as vehicles for acqui-hiring: startups that consciously develop products and services that make for exceptional acquisition properties for larger companies.
For many founders who are acqui-hired, "it's a consolation prize, " says John Coyle, a professor at the University of North Carolina's School of Law who co-wrote a paper on the practice last month with colleague Gregg Polsky.
Startup veterans, for the most part, move on to second careers as angel investors, from which new position they now compete with venture capitalists, often trying to engineer early-exit scenarios at lower multiples, and effectively allying themselves with the big acqui-hiring companies against the traditional VC class.
In this environment, a world apart from the early frontier days of the Internet, hackers today universally exhibit a certain mercenary sensibility, cannily juggling multiple offers, playing judge in hustler beauty contests at hackathons, planning acqui-hire trajectories, and in general maximizing their value as the stewards of the new body of technical knowledge.
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