Joys and Pains of Company Acquisitions

"Marriage is so hard," says the person who has never worked at a company they loved that got acquired. When working at a startup, you dream and salivate at the possibility of being acquired and cashing in. That is one of the main reasons to work at a startup, of course; why else take a pay cut and live with the dread of your company running out of money.

What no one tells you about acquisitions is the uncomfortable ambiguity that you sit in while you wait for it to close, and the uncertainty around your company as that future approaches. What will work look like when it finishes? Will they keep only a handful of us and lay off the rest? Will they kill our product? Most startups want to be acquired; few want to go through the whole process end to end. Here are some of my first-hand experiences from this past year.

You Will Need to Learn to Be Patient

Acquisitions can be very slow in the US. The Federal Trade Commission has one month to make a decision regarding an acquisition, either requesting more information and delaying the closing of the acquisition by another month, or not requesting more information. Regardless, an acquisition typically takes a minimum of one month and a maximum of three months. Woe to the companies that get acquired during Federal Government shutdowns. You may be working, but the FTC isn't, so you will need to wait.

During this time you cannot work with your acquirer. You cannot begin merging your processes because that is anti-competitive. There is also no guarantee the acquisition will actually go through. So the safe play is to continue with business as usual with the knowledge that the acquisition is being worked on.

This odd already-but-not-yet will make work tense. People will feel insecure about the acquisition and the future of their jobs during this time. Most importantly, it will be really hard to feel like your work matters, as it probably will not.

You Will Need to Accept That Your Work Will Be Thrown Out

Startups are a great place to have high-impact work. Even as a junior engineer, if you join early enough you'll get to build net new features that will be critical to landing deals. From there you'll develop ownership and be the go-to person for that part of the product/tech stack.

You'll likely be in the middle of a quarter or sprint when you get the news of the acquisition. Quarterly planning will have kicked off and you'll have work planned for weeks in advance. All of that becomes irrelevant with the acquisition. Likely, none of it will be relevant to the company acquiring you. But you cannot stop working on it! Legally you must continue business as usual and in the worst case, if the acquisition falls through, you'll have wanted to be making something useful.

That is no consolation though. The tradeoff of getting acquired is that you gain a huge upside money-wise if you joined early but lose autonomy. So, your work will probably get thrown out, and if you're really unlucky you'll be doing pointless work for the next few months, waiting for the acquisition to close.

You Will Need to Make the Most of Your Time

This isn't any different than regular life though! Not all of life is exciting and productive. It's normal for work to be useless at a startup too, building pointless features for customers that won't actually use them, only to delete that feature a couple of months later.

Find what you enjoy doing during this time and push for it; you should be doing this anyway if you're able to! If you really enjoy a part of the product then work on it. Sure, it may not be kept in half a year or a year; however, if there ever was a time to do something just for the sake of it then do it now. (This is kind of how most people treat the entirety of December anyway, with code freezes).

Instead of complaining about how the work feels meaningless, create the meaning and make it enjoyable. Find a project and work on it with your favorite co-workers. There really is no other option, unless you wish to feel miserable until the acquisition finishes.

You Will Need to Prepare for All Outcomes

All acquisitions will change how your company operates. Your culture will change, your work will change, the people you work with will change. That is guaranteed.

Prepare yourself for this; don't fool yourself into thinking that your culture will win and that you'll get to keep working as usual. This was never guaranteed even before the acquisition, and I promise you it will not be this way after.

In the worst cases you may experience layoffs or see coworkers get laid off. This too is a normal part of acquisitions. The purchasing company usually has existing salespeople or office managers that they will prefer. Or they'll have engineering managers that they will want running the new organization. Demotions will likely happen and people will get filled in.

You may also see people leave your team for the larger company, finding their way into new problems. If this option is open to you and other team members are moving onto a similar area, go for it! The best way to onboard into a new company is to join with people you already know and trust.

Regardless, prepare yourself for having to look for a new job. If you get laid off you'll beat yourself up over not having been ready. If you get swapped onto new work you hate, you'll regret it as well. It's never too early to sharpen your skills, and in times of uncertainty it is a way to gain back some sense of control.

You Will Be Okay

When the acquisition for my company was announced, I was initially ecstatic. I thought we'd get higher pay and better benefits, all true of course, and we'd all still get to work on the same stuff. Then I slowly realized that would not be the case. Our product was going to be slowly deprioritized and parts of it deprecated. I grieved the loss of our plans as I had hoped to work on our APIs and demonstrate myself as capable of being a Senior Engineer in the following year. I grieved my team, and finally acknowledged that we would all likely be on different teams in the coming months. I grieved my company because it was the first full-time job I ever had and I loved it.

I was offered an opportunity to join a new team at the larger company. At first I was a little nervous due to it being a new codebase with a new language, and also more demanding. After a couple of weeks I've found it quite fun! I got to swap over with others from my old startup and we've formed a comfortable pod. I certainly don't know what the future holds for us as we approach a reorg, but I know for certain it will be different and that I will be okay.

The uncertainty is uncomfortable and I wanted to have more control over it. There is nothing I can do about it though. We can only move forward and make decisions about what has happened. Life constantly changes, and this is just another part. Grieve, and then move forward.

Do not say, "Why were the old days better than these?"

For it is not wise to ask such questions.

Ecclesiastes 7:10