Actually I think it would be cool to ask ~10 big acquirers, both of talent and of products/tech, to see how they'd feel about deals with these terms.
Google seemed ok with Etherpad running in parallel for a while. The concerns seem to be:
* Acq wants to be able to develop their own products with the tech, less competition -- shutting off system supports that, but so does disabling new account creation on it, and making your own product superior. Some changes seem ok, some seem borderline (flickr -> yahoo login), but just shutting down a service is different.
* Wanting full resources of the team -- running the old site on autopilot
* If the old service is inherently unsustainable (patent/IP issues, negative marginal income, ...); the former might be a big deal (although YouTube won by having the Google lawhammer on their side), and the latter might not be a big deal if the absolute dollar value involved is low relative to the deal.
Even if a deal ends up being 5% less due to the requirement that the service stay operating after acq, if it makes user acq easier so you get 2x more users and thus a 2-10x higher valuation, it's win/win/win/win (acq, founders, investors, users).
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Actually I think it would be cool to ask ~10 big acquirers, both of talent and of products/tech, to see how they'd feel about deals with these terms.
Google seemed ok with Etherpad running in parallel for a while. The concerns seem to be: * Acq wants to be able to develop their own products with the tech, less competition -- shutting off system supports that, but so does disabling new account creation on it, and making your own product superior. Some changes seem ok, some seem borderline (flickr -> yahoo login), but just shutting down a service is different.
* Wanting full resources of the team -- running the old site on autopilot
* If the old service is inherently unsustainable (patent/IP issues, negative marginal income, ...); the former might be a big deal (although YouTube won by having the Google lawhammer on their side), and the latter might not be a big deal if the absolute dollar value involved is low relative to the deal.
Even if a deal ends up being 5% less due to the requirement that the service stay operating after acq, if it makes user acq easier so you get 2x more users and thus a 2-10x higher valuation, it's win/win/win/win (acq, founders, investors, users).