[irq]: techie interrupted

“You can then go into a bar with your friends the day after the deal closes and tell your friends, ‘Hey, I just sold my company to Google.’ And, that’s going to go over really well. People are going to be really excited for you,” he says.

What’s not said in that bar is that the startup probably wasn’t doing so well. It was not destined to be the next Twitter.

“So there’s a lot of startup companies. A lot of them won’t be able to raise another round of financing, and they’ll need an exit strategy or they need to shut down,” says Yoichiro Taku, a lawyer who has worked on acqui-hire deals.

An acqui-hire is an exit strategy that can make many people happy. Investors get money back, the tech giants get to hire people who might not have wanted to work there otherwise, and the founders look like they just had a success.