Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32070747

by psim1 • 4 years ago

120 167 4 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

By "ruin" I mean the less tangible parts of the smaller company, such as the culture, the enthusiasm and spirit, the flexibility, the overall happiness.

Having now been in two medium-sized companies that have been acquired by large, public firms, I find that everything we enjoyed is gone. Perks slowly disappear; meetings, trainings, and general wastes of time increase; productivity slows; engineers become demoralized; processes grind through bureaucracy. As I understand it, this is typical.

What are some examples where acquisitions like this have happened and the smaller company wasn't essentially destroyed?

neilk• 4 years ago

Salesforce recently acquired Tableau and from what I hear the acquisition has probably improved things at Tableau.

This is a very special case though! Tableau is a company with a lot of Fortune 500 buy-in, but an aging development stack and business model. So this is the case of a somewhat more dynamic larger company acquiring a set of customers and some fundamental tech.

Usually acquisitions are from big/slow/established/monopoly acquiring an upstart and it’s no surprise that usually ends up badly.

digb• 4 years ago

Having previously worked at SFDC, I would not wager that it's much more dynamic than Tableau.

arama471• 4 years ago

I worked at Tableau until very recently and I can't think of any way that the Salesforce acquisition has improved things yet (I do think it will eventually improve things). Did you hear about anything specific?

dsaavy• 4 years ago

I've been working with Tableau for around 10 years and the most noticeable thing was making it easier for both developers and end-users to use the platform. Everything from mobile, to toolbar improvements, alerts, the API, etc. seem to have really come together.

Now, these could all have very well been in development before the acquisition, but as a whole, the capabilities have grown tremendously since that time.

Also, it seems like the licensing options for smaller businesses has really been focused on since the acquisition. It's become much more affordable for a small business to get and use Tableau compared to 4-5 years ago.

superb-owl• 4 years ago

This sounds more like small company vs big company culture, rather than specifically the effects of acquisition. Some folks are much happier at a small, nimble company. Some folks like the stability and predictability of a larger company. Sounds like you're in the former camp.

There are cases where the acquired company is left to run more-or-less independently, and its stock is just owned (or majority-owned) by the acquirer. But that's probably the exception rather than the rule. Usually, if you get acquired, you're now an employee of Big Co.

InTheArena2• 4 years ago

NeXT with Apple is a pretty solid canonical case. In that situation, it really became a reverse acquisition with Steve Jobs regaining control of Apple.

We've done a number of acquisitions - and most seem to have done well. A big portion of that is recognizing that you are not only acquiring the company - it's IP and people - but also it's culture. If you don't want that culture - if it's not better then yours, you don't want it.

fredguth2• 4 years ago

I like the example, but can you say that NeXT was a large acquisition for Apple? How big was NeXT compared to Apple? Does size matter in this analysis? I believe so. I don't know much about this particular acquisition, but I always assumed that buying NeXT was the price to get Jobs back.

jjoonathan• 4 years ago

Aren't half the UI classes in OSX still prefixed with "NS" for NextStep?

PAPPPmAc2• 4 years ago

I've seen and used the phrase "NeXT bought Apple with Apple's money" for that acquisition, they didn't just replace Gil Amelio with Steve Jobs, they also had a huge fraction of their management and tech leads swapped out with NeXT folk in pretty short order. They also turned over a huge number of board members in '96-97 as Apple flailed then reformed. Apple spent $429M on NeXT (Apples market cap at the time was around $2B) when they were losing about $700M a quarter and expected to be bankrupt by the end of 1996. They slid through the bad spot partly on a $150M investment (...possibly motivated by antitrust avoidance) from Microsoft.

Steve drove (Chief Operating Officer) Marco Landi and (chief technologist) Ellen Hancock out even before he became CEO. Bertrand Serlet (1997-2009) then Craig Federighi (2009-) ran the (variously named) OS team and Avie Tenivan was the tech lead, all former NeXT folks (which makes sense because Apple failed at 3 OS projects then shipped reskinned NeXTStep). Bud Tribble followed Steve to NeXT then back to Apple in various VP roles. George Crow and Jon Rubinstein did the same kind of loop working on hardware platforms at Apple-NeXT-Apple. Mitch Mandich became SVP of sales almost immediately after the acquisition. Etc.

chubot2• 4 years ago

The crazy thing is that Disney -> Pixar was also pretty much a reverse acquisition, so Steve was involved in 2 of those. At the time of acquisition his wife was the largest Disney shareholder, so she had more shares than anyone in the Disney family

Seems like Pixar is doing well and Disney is taking influence from them

leoncaet• 4 years ago

Pixar movies had an artistic downfall after the Disney acquisition. But sure they are doing fine financially-wise and technology-wise.

pjlegato• 4 years ago

In this case, Apple's culture changed to match NeXT's.

countvonbalzac• 4 years ago

Instagram ($1 billion), WhatsApp ($19 billion)

skciva• 4 years ago

Obviously we'll never know but I'd love to see an alternate timeline where those acquisitions didn't happen.

Instagram specifically has just become another ad infested shopping app for me these days.

pgwhalen• 4 years ago

I'm not a meaningful Instagram user nor would I defend it as "good", but from a "success" perspective, for my demographic (I'm a 30-something US resident), it is clearly the most relevant social network.

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

Not an expert, but I'm curious if one difference between the buyer and buyee (in the author's situations) is SOCS2 compliance.

Clubber• 4 years ago

I find that everything we enjoyed is gone. Perks slowly disappear; meetings, trainings, and general wastes of time increase; productivity slows; engineers become demoralized; processes grind through bureaucracy. As I understand it, this is typical.

The first time I was in a company that got acquired, this happened. Then it got acquired again by an even bigger fish and it didn't really happen because it already sucked after the first time.

The second company that got acquired it also happened. Usually the suck starts after a year when managers try to increase their bonuses by finding "synergies," which really means cutting employees through consolidation and adding a bunch of unnecessary friction to the development process.

The lesson I've learned is if you get acquired, you've got about a year to get out or you will be miserable if you aren't the big-co type. I made the mistake of staying too long both times it's happened to me.

To answer your question, I've never been at a company that got acquired and it was better for me.

otium• 4 years ago

Twitch by Amazon($1 billion)

fredguth2• 4 years ago

What defines a big acquisition? Price or comparable size of the acquirer versus acquired?

ianbicking• 4 years ago

Zappos and Whole Foods also seem to be operating very similarly under Amazon as they were before.

jerlam• 4 years ago

Zappos is just a call center now. I visited their HQ in Vegas a while ago, all the fulfillment and product info is now done by Amazon.

taylorwc• 4 years ago

Pixar acquisition by Disney comes to mind

tpmx4• 4 years ago

Strong disagreement. The acquisition happened in 2006. The last few great Pixar movies were in the pipeline already (Ratatouille - 2007, WALL-E - 2008, Up - 2009).

no-dr-onboard• 4 years ago

I disagree too from a animation/story-quality perspective, but from a business perspective, Pixar seems to be doing well enough to meet OPs criteria of not being ruined.

xnx• 4 years ago

Counterpoint: Inside Out, Soul

jedberg2• 4 years ago

Technically that was a merger, which made Steve Jobs the largest Disney shareholder (more than any member of the Disney family).

But yeah you have a good point. They retained their culture and in fact spread it further by having the Pixar folks take over Disney Animation.

BryantD2• 4 years ago

I'd argue that Marvel is another example, although a complex one. Marvel Comics has changed very little in terms of culture; Ike Perlmutter runs it very much the way he ran it when it was independent. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has been great for Marvel but is no longer under Marvel Comics proper (it's part of the studio group now).

As long as we're doing Disney acquisitions, Lucasfilm is also still pretty independent and successful. Other Disney acquisitions have been less so.

groovybits• 4 years ago

Lucasfilm, perhaps.

LucasArts (now known as Lucasfilm Games)... tell that to the games that were put on hold and then eventually cancelled upon acquisition.

alberth4• 4 years ago

Oracle acquiring Sun.

I know there is a lot of Oracle hate but: MySQL, GraalVM (Java), Sun hardware (both Exa* and SPARC), VirtualBox and many more technologies are better today than prior.

The challenge Sun would have had, regardless of Oracle or not, is that they were solidly in the On-Prem business ... and the market has moved to Cloud.

jedberg2• 4 years ago

Lol talk to anyone who was there and they would tell you that Oracle absolutely destroyed Sun.

alberth4• 4 years ago

I was there.

Nothing destroyed. Just differences in company culture.

The alternative for Sun was IBM to buy them. An acquisition by IBM would have been the death of Sun. Sun, under Oracle, still lives on well today.

creshal• 4 years ago

Even on the remaining on-prem market, who's still using MySQL over MariaDB or Postgres? Who's using SPARC over X64? Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?

linksnapzz• 4 years ago

Enough people so that it's profitable.

nibbleshifter3• 4 years ago

Who's using SPARC over X64?

A lot of telecoms stuff.

Who's using Virtualbox over HyperV, Libvirt or VMWare?

A considerable number of people who want an open source virtualization solution that is relatively painless to use (so, not libvirt).

ipaddr• 4 years ago

More people are using MySQL over mariaDB and postgres install base is a fraction of mysql.

carimura• 4 years ago

I wasn't at Sun but am on the Java team now at Oracle. I'm constantly amazed by the inventor culture that Sun had, the people who came from there, and the legacy it has produced, but we all know how the business ended. That's no environment for a world-changing development platform to thrive.

It took a few years to find its footing, but Oracle has really given Java the space and resources to thrive. The roadmap is fuller than it ever has been and the release cadence continues to deliver value. Check out projects Amber, Loom, Panama, Valhalla. Tap into the stream of Inside.java. Exciting times.

Point being, I believe Java is a datapoint for successful product acquisition.

silvestrov• 4 years ago

The Java language has improved a lot since Oracle took over. It started to languish at Sun, like they didn't want to put any effort into it.

skizm• 4 years ago

Instagram and WhatsApp (so far)? Smaller scale: Condé Nast didn’t ruin Reddit for the most part.

dehrmann• 4 years ago

Condé neglected reddit for a while, then spun it back out. I think they owned it for 5 years. While not good, neglect is arguably better than trying to change too much.

theanirudh• 4 years ago

YouTube

RubberShoes• 4 years ago

Google acquiring YouTube

"In the Plex" by Steven Levy goes into great detail on how YouTube could not survive its growth without the infrastructure and ad technologies Google brought to the platform.

paulgb• 4 years ago

I realize OP is talking more about the experience of the workers than the users, and I don't have an inside scoop here, but I'd put forward “Google acquiring Keyhole” as well. Google was in a unique position to allow anyone with a browser to view satellite photos from around the world, for free, and have the economics make sense for them.

splonk• 4 years ago

I have a somewhat inside scoop from working with various early Keyhole employees, and my impression is that they were generally happy with the acquisition. At the very least, quite a few of them stuck around long past the golden handcuffs stage.

jessriedel2• 4 years ago

That's an argument for the acquisition of YT by Google being net positive, but it doesn't answer the OP's question, which he specifically restricts to the "less tangible parts of the smaller company".

macspoofing• 4 years ago

but it doesn't answer the OP's question

I think it does, otherwise OP's question is ill-posed. That is, if YouTube scaled independently from a scrappy startup to a $170billion behemoth, the changes in corporate governance and culture would have been equally as drastic as being acquired by Google.

cleansingfire• 4 years ago

That sounds like the author is defining good as "what I like, and can't or won't tell you."

olalonde• 4 years ago

Also Android.

stagger87• 4 years ago

This happens all the time. It is essentially the business strategy of many (not all!) conglomerates. Scoop up successful companies and let them keep running as they are, sometimes with even greater success due to things like access to money and peers. I've worked for a few subsidiaries through the acquisition process, and aside from some accountants showing up once a year, everything remained the same.

iancmceachern• 4 years ago

I have lots of examples where they ruined it.

aliswe3• 4 years ago

Thats interesting as well, care to tell?

curiousllama• 4 years ago

OP - Of your 5 criteria, 2 will change by the very nature of what it is to be acquired. The other 3 are essentially 1 (how excited are we about this change?)

Culture: there's different people around, now. So culture necessarily changes.

Flexibility: bigger companies are less flexible because there are simply more people. Even if every individual is more flexible, it doesn't matter.

Enthusiasm, spirit, and happiness - are these not synonyms, in this context? And if they are, are they not reactions to external factors (culture & flexibility)?

I would suggest your question may be tautological: big companies will always ruin small companies from the perspective of someone who likes small companies because the small company became big.

psim1• 4 years ago

I think there's a finesse to it where the bigger company can in many ways adopt the smaller company culture, leave it alone, or bring in their own unique and not bad culture. Big != sucks, necessarily. Some of the other comments have insightful examples.

kerblang• 4 years ago

While not answering the question, I think a lot of companies are acquired in a state of immaturity and then comes the problem of succeeding as actual grownups. Everyone blames the acquirer but it's not that simple. I work with a group that still has leftover ego-execution mismatch and it's tiresome.

onlyrealcuzzo• 4 years ago

Instagram?

QuillianR• 4 years ago

LVMH has purchased a lot of companies that have maintained success, but they are a holding company that runs companies more as independent subsidiaries. If software followed this model it might be alright, but most of the acquisitions by big companies are trying to merge the new company into the old, vs. buying, running and sustaining a company as a continuing business.

0xPersona• 4 years ago

John Collison explores this subject in an episode of Invest Like The Best [1]. He talks about conglomerates like LVMH and Danaher and how they often give managers of acquired companies latitude in how they operate. He also points out that no one in technology has done what is actually pretty common in the rest of the world, namely, one holding company for a whole bunch of independent businesses that are sharing expertise. A counterexample mentioned is Constellation Software [2] which owns about 500 businesses. I definitely think this style of business is underrated and will grow in popularity.

The whole episode is brilliant, full of great insights that I think about often. It's well worth a listen.

[1] https://www.joincolossus.com/episodes/34646260/collison-grow...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constellation_Software

randomly123• 4 years ago

https://www.motherson.com/company/history

This company does decent M&A in the auto ancilliaries industry

open-source-ux• 4 years ago

Amazon owns the following companies selling books:

- AbeBooks (acquired by Amazon in 2008)

- Book Depository (acquired by Amazon in 2011)

These companies don't appeared to have changed dramatically from when Amazon bought them. I wonder if these companies operate 'independently' without too much undue influence from Amazon?

influx2• 4 years ago

You left out Amazing acquiring IMDB in 1998! Hasn't changed much since then. Likewise woot.com in 2010.

krallja• 4 years ago

woot.com is not a good example of company culture staying good. The employees got so fed up, they left and started meh.com, which seems to be just “woot.com again.”

skinnymuch3• 4 years ago

In more recent years, someone within the Amazon org chart ruined Box Office Mojo for IMDB. The shutting down of the forums seemed unnecessary too. Both seem to have been done to push IMDB as a more professional site for sales.

AdmiralAsshat• 4 years ago

Counter-point: Amazon bought Mobipocket in 2005, the guys who created the MOBI e-book format, turned the mobi format into their AZW format for Kindle books, then shut Mobipocket down.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobipocket

harel4• 4 years ago

I think github got better after Microsoft bought them. They were in some stale rut for a long time before that.

moolcool• 4 years ago

I agree, but this is a hot take among a lot of free software purists.

harel4• 4 years ago

Yes that is true, but lucky for me, I'm not one. So I can clearly see how much better it become. I don't even understand why. I would have thought they were profitable before the acquisition (were they?) so why resources only started being applied afterwards?

aliqot2• 4 years ago

Not sure whether I'd be labeled a purist, but I've been stdlib only for a while now, and tend to choose the open choice over the left hand path of the corporate capitalist patriarchy, I wouldn't call myself outright biased though ( I kid. )

However, all jests aside, being a relatively open source person, I haven't seen much in the git product of Github getting any worse after Microsoft acquired them. The social aspect, well, it is what it is, and I don't care for it, but I don't necessarily think my preferences translate well to a quarterly earnings call.

I do personally perceive the downtime to be more frequent now, but maybe only because it's more publicized, I do not have any data to substantiate that personal observation.

eatonphil• 4 years ago

Yep I agree. And unlike where lots of acquisitions die down after years even if they do ok initially, it's taken years but Github finally seems to be increasing the pace of innovation.

sofixa• 4 years ago

The got better because they finally got to money to try to be competitive with GitLab. Before that they were really behind on features.

However their reliability is down the toilet. So a mixed bag, IMHO.

Noe20973• 4 years ago

I'm curious here: what got better in GitHub since the acquisition?

It's a genuine question, I'm not being sarcastic, I really don't understand the statement (which seems to be shared by several people here). I honestly can't point out a single thing that was delivered that changed the game for like, 6 years from now if not more (copilot is a nice gadget IMHO but it's not really game changer, is it?).

I was actually hoping that MS support would change that, but I don't see it happening.

lghh2• 4 years ago

I have enjoyed using Actions. The GitHub integration into VSCode has been a huge productivity boon for me as well.

gherkinnn• 4 years ago

Off the top of my head: Tree view in PRs, the new projects board, code search, Mermaid and maths in markdown, the cmd+k action bar thing, Copilot, the best VS Code themes, lots of small changes like Readme TOC, and so on.

Maybe these changes are incremental, maybe you don’t cherish them as much as I do ,and some were very much over due. Regardless, I like them and am impressed by Github’s recent work.

harel4• 4 years ago

The app(!), the inline vscode INSIDE github (just press the . [dot] key when in the repo), actions, general interface, settings to name a few.

aliswe3• 4 years ago

Github actions. Word on the street is that all DevOps personell moved to the GH actions team (which to me dosnt really sound reasonable btw) to bring it up to DevOps parity. Autopilot, those web based dev stations, mermaid integration ...

smcleod• 4 years ago

I couldn't disagree more, GitHub has had significantly more outages - especially transient ones and is now focused on smashing out sales driven features rather stability and core functionality.

harel4• 4 years ago

The "Internet" had significantly more outages recently, and a lot was to do with Cloudflare. Either way, in the grand scheme of things, an outage is a sliver of a percent of the time, while new features are (almost maybe probably) for ever.

jokethrowaway• 4 years ago

I'd say the opposite.

Reliability went way down after the acquisition.

It feels like we constantly have issues with github, it's becoming as bad as azure.

Actions, Packages and Projects (beta) are nice product ideas but they are a nightmare of DX experience.

You can see they rushed them out to compete with Gitlab.

Also dodgy stuff like Copilot.

seaourfreed• 4 years ago

Android, AdWords, MS DOS was acquired for $70k, instagram

vannevar• 4 years ago

I don't know what it's like from the inside, but from the outside the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook has gone much better than I expected. I really thought Oculus would be gone within a year, but they've continued to put out some great products. Other than the misstep about requiring Facebook accounts, it seems like a success.

bdcravens• 4 years ago

At least in the case of (many) startups, most are built with acquisition in mind. Many time perks are there only to attract talent to get the company to the exit, but aren't part of the long term business plan.

terravion• 4 years ago

Deloitte's acquisition of BearingPoint's Federal practice in 2008-9. Fascinating to watch from the inside -- literally the same people increased revenue & margins with happier employees, primarily driven by implementing a better management and incentives culture with better HR practices. Also interesting that Deloitte hired their corporate M&A integration group to run the integration for themselves.

wiseleo• 4 years ago

Cisco's acquisitions. There's a book about them. The Crescendo switch acquisition was extremely successful and they became Catalyst switches.

pea• 4 years ago

Cisco has an interesting playbook with spin-outs as well, that I haven't seen many companies pull off (i.e. mpls multiple times over)

kodah• 4 years ago

Salesforce's acquisition of Slack, possibly. A good portion of folks I know don't even know Slack was acquired, which is a good sign.

Mandatum• 4 years ago

They haven't changed anything. Yet. Dreamforce isn't for a few more months.

Also Slack and Salesforce's culture is very different. Salesforce is closer to Oracle, Slack always had super-technical, friendly sales and support staff.

I'm sure we'll see price hikes and a push to land larger, government and Enterprise contracts as they forget about SME.

gilbetron• 4 years ago

Cisco bought Duo Security, and by all accounts from the people I know that work there, the culture is pretty intact and people happy. Maybe that has changed in the past year or so, though!

simonw• 4 years ago

Sadly Heroku/Salesforce used to be my go-to-example here, but that fell apart a few years ago when they effectively froze new feature development.

stedman• 4 years ago

The Acquired podcast does case studies of successful acquisitions:

https://www.acquired.fm/

It's an amazing show

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

So, one thing to keep in mind with all of this is that, if it was a small, fast-growing startup that got acquired, there was zero chance of it staying that way even if it did not get acquired. Being small and fast-growing for very long, is by definition impossible. In many cases, when a smaller company gets acquired by a big one, it's because they have hit the point where the founder of the smaller company realizes that their company's infrastructure and culture aren't going to work at a large scale, so they would rather offload the task of turning into a big company to somebody who already knows how to do that. But, even if they hadn't, they usually would have had to turn into something that looked a lot like the big company they got acquired by, anyway.

mekoka• 4 years ago

Sometimes you just get acquired because "large sums of money". Some startups are on their way way up, with spare room to improve on their value proposition and mission at the time of their acquisition, and it's difficult to know what the road not traveled would've looked like. Even if you see improvements post-acquisition, you can't tell if the acquisition actually stifled the potential. For some of the companies lauded in this very thread, I'd argue that's the case.

waynesonfire• 4 years ago

This is such bs. Why do you have to grow so fast? Wtf. Stop taking loans and having to sell your soul to get out.

mikercampbell• 4 years ago

The best way to do X is to do it as hard as possible until it becomes Y overnight.

Haha I joke, but seriously. I was cramming my way to the finish line of my startup idea when I realized I didn't need to. HN showed me that side-gigs can be as big or small as you want or need them to be, customers be willing.

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

Well you don't _have_ to grow fast. But a slow-growing or not-growing company also has a very different feel. Fast-growing companies have lots of room for growth for everyone who works there, because there are new positions and new responsibilities opening up all the time. Slow-growing companies have less of that, so somebody else has to leave or die before you get a chance to move up. Sometimes, this is still better than the problems of fast growth, but it is a tradeoff.

Also, if you took VC money to start the company in the first place, then you may require fast growth in order to offer some prospect of a return to the people who invested with you. Similarly, if you maxed out your credit cards and took loans from family to get going, you need/want to grow fast to pay that back. Not every small company is in that situation, but many of them are.

balderdash• 4 years ago

Yep - it just accelerates what would have happened down the road.

In addition to institutionalization (yeah “asking Bob” is not a scalable solution) the other thing is risk skew changes. When you’re a startup in a garage with nothing to lose, who cares about compliance and adhering to laws and regulations (there is very little downside, and you’re a small target). When you’re worth a $1b now you’re a bigger target, and have value to protect…

rossdavidh3• 4 years ago

Truth; Uber comes to mind.

spullara• 4 years ago

BEA's acquisition of WebLogic and Oracle's acquisition of BEA (at that point, basically WebLogic).

zippergz• 4 years ago

I might only half-jokingly say that these acquisitions did not ruin the company because they were already too terrible to be ruined...

varjag• 4 years ago

GitHub, LinkedIn

dev_by_day2• 4 years ago

Trello by Atlassian. They have tried to rollout some of the UX improvements from Trello into other products and kept the majority of the talent.

smueller12342• 4 years ago

Booking.com was acquired by Priceline for 100M in 2005. Now it's >80% of value and revenue of the parent company. By that logic, booking's value peaked over 80b$.

I was there from 2010-2017. The philosophy of the holdings was to let its constituent companies execute independently and even compete (this included Priceline.com, Agoda, Kayak, rentalcars.com, OpenTable, etc). Therefore the culture of booking.com remained fairly intact for a very long time.

skinnymuch3• 4 years ago

Purely acquisitions/mergers, Booking.com has to be a best tech one in the modern era, if not ever. After Instagram. YouTube and Doubleclick are the others that fit in a top 5.

By 2010, was Booking.com seen as the essential core of Priceline? Were the people leading the overall company and/or Booking decisions, Priceline people or Booking.com people?

smueller12342• 4 years ago

Agreed, that was a legendary acquisition.

That being said, I think it was not a mistake for the previous owner(s) to sell at the time. Priceline had cash, and the marketing heavy ("buy ads in January, stay in summer, bill hotel at the end of the month after the stay") business had significant cash flow challenges in terms of growth.

When I joined in late 2010, Booking still seemed to be viewed as a bit of a poorly understood miracle by the group folks, growing nearly 2x every year. Certainly the engineering department was so much less... corporate... than the mothership's that we were sometimes referred to as the cowboys in Amsterdam.

Shortly thereafter, they hired Darren Huston to run Booking, who relatively soon after that (like 24 months? I'm sure Google search will find that answer) also became the group CEO, all based in Amsterdam. At the latest then, Booking would have been officially the core of the company, even though it had been the growth motor for well longer.

Historically, the benefits offered by Priceline group to booking were IMO chiefly aforementioned cash flow for growth, and shared technical infrastructure (WAN, shared colo space). Booking had outgrown the group infrastructure team's ability to scale. The perpetual culture clash eventually led to the central infrastructure group being broken up (very much an outcome driven by the booking CTO, Brendan Bank). So we built our own network and DC team since we had far, far outgrown the infrastructure needs of other group companies.

For a long time, Booking was so focused on only doing things that were strictly measurable and attributable that we didn't do any brand advertising or classical marketing (cf. quantitative fallacy). We co-grew with Google search ads in particular and had built very significant tooling around AdWords since the Google provided infrastructure didn't scale. Unofficially, we were the largest ads customer for a long time spending billions annually at useful ROI. This "stealth mode" meant that we weren't getting a lot of DDoS type threats to deal with for example and likely less fraud risk. It also meant that we always chuckled in earnings calls when analysts praised the "Priceline business being very successful overseas". Eventually reality caught up and PCLN became BKNG - Booking Holdings.

'twas a wild ride. Not always fun but chock full of learning.

AMA if you like.

johnwalkr• 4 years ago

I almost forgot about the original Priceline. It used to offer up to 75% discounts on premium hotel rooms.. if you were willing to take the risk on getting a midrange room for a 10% discount or 20 minute walk from a metro station. The gambling component was fun and you could avoid those risks easily using VPNs. That experience is diluted and now is much less than the value of booking direct and membership points for me.

Booking.com is still good though. I always use it for my first search for accommodation, then reserve using booking.com, or direct with a hotel depending on which one has the best cancellation/change policy. That is still so important due to COVID and frequent flight cancellations.

dev_by_day2• 4 years ago

Zappos by Amazon. I've heard they gave them a fair amount of autonomy and have been supportive.

throwaway931• 4 years ago

VMware's acquisition by EMC went well for most of the employees (at least during the initial years). For all practical purposes, EMC left VMware alone.

amf12• 4 years ago

Linkedin and Github acquisition by Microsoft.

Github and Linkedin both have their own culture, perks, and the companies are run independently. Infact, Linkedin pays better than Microsoft and are overall happier.

skinnymuch3• 4 years ago

LinkedIn is and was a massive purchase too compared to most other examples.

iainctduncan2• 4 years ago

(background: I work in tech mergers and acquisitions for a company that does pre-acquisition diligence.)

It is worth noting that, most of the time, the things that are so wonderful about working at the small company are fun for all the same reasons that they aren't sustainable. Most startups are not cash positive - they don't make money, they just lose money more slowly than they get investment (by selling off bits of the company). So very often, the stuff you want to have continue just can't because it was based on imaginary income. The exit plan always involves the company becoming profitable at some point (maybe after multiple rounds of acquisitions) and that usually means that on each round the company has to become more realistic about how they spend their money, including how they manage their devs.

On the other hand, it's true that a small lifestyle company can keep many of those things, but they do that by not having a plan to sell, which tends to mean you get the spirit and independence but not the throwing-around-cash-like-it-was-free fun times.

When you factor in opportunity-cost, the whole office plays lazer tag on friday is really bloody expensive.

stevage• 4 years ago

How do Google and Facebook etc manage it then?

iainctduncan2• 4 years ago

Note that I said "most of the time". Google and Facebook are so far off the usual scenarios for startups and acquisitions that it's not even relevant. We do hundreds of acquisition diligences a year and the FAANG playbook is a whole different beast from the vast majority of acquisitions.

Noe20973• 4 years ago

Dassault Systèmes acquiring Solidworks.

Most users don't know that Solidworks, which is well know as a mid level solution for CAD, is actually owned by the French company developing CATIA, which is practically used by every single serious manufacturer in the world (from automotive to aircraft to ship to factory to you name it).

The geometric kernel powering these two is now the same, but it wasn't for years. I guess it's a good illustration of why this acquisition was successful and didn't ruin Solidworks: the company was left practically untouched for more than ten years. "assimilation" took place at a very slow pace (almost cosmological for a software company).

Now the question to ask is more why the acquisition is taking place. To get a list of customers? To get skilled contributors, or knowledge, or patent, or a piece of technology? To get a presence in a different country? All or a part of this? To kill a competitor?

Anyway you put it, acquisition is not a neutral move. It's always joining a bigger structure, hence jumping to a later stage and size at extreme speed. Considering how difficult it is for a single company to get through its different stages by itself, it is normal that acquisitions are hard for acquired companies. Assuming the objective is not to kill the acquired, tremendous efforts will be needed on both sides to make it work. The acquiring company ramping up newcomers, on new actual processes, on new ways of doing; the acquired one to agree to it, and accept that it is the cost to pay to operate at a higher scale.

JeremyHerrman• 4 years ago

Did Solidworks actually move away from Parasolid? I had thought that only some 3DEXPERIENCE cloud products were using CGM, but Solidworks on the desktop was still based on Parasolid.

Czarcasm• 4 years ago

Over the last 10 years Dassault has slowly been destroying Solidworks. Each update brings new bugs, and almost no new features.

They are now trying to force all users over to their new 3DExperience platform which is a half-baked pile of garbage for all but large companies which can afford to have a dedicated IT team to support it.

Dassault did kill Solidworks, it just took them some time.

heisenzombie• 4 years ago

That's an unusual example. In my experience, Dassault are horrible to deal with. Their byzantine sales and aggressive legal departments have our company seriously looking to jump ship despite the large moving costs that would entail.

Noe20973• 4 years ago

Oh fully agreed; SolidWorks is much more an exception than the norm here.

hedora• 4 years ago

AOL/Time Warner

(Time Warner was the acquired company.)

Ancalagon• 4 years ago

Instagram, arguably

vosper• 4 years ago

Agreed, and I also think Meta/Facebook's acquisition of Oculus was good for Oculus, too. Meta just reversed course on the requirement to have a Facebook account, which was the big thing people complained about. They're pouring enormous resources into VR with a long-term timeline. By some accounts it's less like Facebook took over Oculus, and more like Oculus took over Facebook.

I hope Valve sticks it out with VR, because though I do not like or use Facebook I think Zuckerberg could be right about VR, and someone needs to compete with Meta. I think for Valve it's potentially an existential threat.

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

You know, I finally uninstalled instagram on my phone after yet another disappointment with the mobile app.

It may not be entirely related to the acquisition, but they have been focusing much more on "stories" lately over pictures, and the text is an afterthought.

The final straw for me was trying to highlight some text on a "video post" that explained what the heck I just saw, to expand it, or copy it to search for something, and I realized I just couldn't. Instead, every time I tapped on the text, the Instagram app was certain that that gesture meant I wanted to jump disconcertingly to the next photo/story. I tried to go back, and it would start playing the previous video with the elided text teasingly at the edge of the screen, and then when I would try to expand it, it would jump to the next one again.

I'm sorry, but Instagram has completely gotten away from its roots, and the app has been corrupted by some pathetic attempt to drive engagement or whatever it is management thinks is important

orthecreedence• 4 years ago

I worked at Aol when Huffington Post acquired them for -$300M and the culture stayed mostly the same.

e9• 4 years ago

Firebase acquired by Google

kylehotchkiss• 4 years ago

Innovations slowed significantly. I'm still waiting for a nice first party backup solution for firestore (I get a cloud firestore backup thing exists, but not especially elegant for newer devs). Their RTDB had a nice one: https://firebase.google.com/docs/database/backups

hestefisk2• 4 years ago

From the outside, IBM/RH merger looks like IBM tried to keep culture and organisation intact. Anyone from the inside who can comment?

tchock23• 4 years ago

I’ve heard from a RH engineer that IBM has largely left them alone.

warrenm• 4 years ago

From what I know of RH folks (across the spectrum) who stuck around through and after the acquisition ... so far IBM hasn't mucked it up too much

The risk of someone walking out and starting Orange Sombrero Linux with 99% of RH's code (ie all the OSS stuff) seems to be keeping IBM in check (for now...)

hestefisk2• 4 years ago

Haha orange sombrero

rsecora• 4 years ago

2005: Yahoo! invested in Alibaba buying a 40% stake in the company for US$1 billion.

2014: US$10 billion in Alibaba's IPO alone to Yahoo.

2019: Altaba (yahoo remains owning Alibaba+YahooJapan) liquidates for US$40 billions.

websap• 4 years ago

Instagram. Facebook did a pretty good job maintaining the core product.

ryan_lane• 4 years ago

Except that now Facebook has been messing with Instagram, and the feed is basically exactly the same as Facebook. More than half of my feed is content from accounts I haven't followed, and it's mostly the same short-video format that makes Facebook's feed awful to use.

tech234a• 4 years ago

I think there is a button to “Snooze suggested posts in feed for 30 days”

shakkhar• 4 years ago

Whatsapp and IG

nonameiguess• 4 years ago

I'm probably answering too late to not get lost at this point in the sea of people answering regarding products not being ruined, but as far as actual company culture, E Systems survived quite well and intact after being acquired by Raytheon in the late 90s. One of my earlier jobs in Richardson, TX was at a facility that originally belonged to E Systems and I worked on one of the longstanding programs they'd had for decades. It very much stood out as being nothing at all like the rest of Raytheon. They had exemptions for nearly every corporate policy. People on any other program got moved around at will to meet the needs of the larger company, but anybody who had been with E Systems stayed exactly where they wanted to be doing what they wanted to do, even decades after the acquisition. They kept all of their original scheduling policies, continued using the same project management methods and tech stack without having to give in to corporate flavor of the month "Agile DevOps transformation" stuff that everyone else had to do.

It's honestly probably still the best job in software I've ever had, and the actual system I worked on is still the most impressive I've been a part of, the exception to the rule of government shit projects, heavily classified but absolutely miles ahead of the closest commercial analog. If the pay wasn't so low, I'd gladly still be there. It's a dream job in every way except compensation.

throw4837263• 4 years ago

- Geely acquiring Volvo

- ANTA acquiring Arcteryx

FunnyBadger• 4 years ago

When I was involved in M&A for a Fortune 20 company, the rate of failures for M&A we were told by various accounting firms and consultants was that 90% of all M&A never achieve the goals of doing it. So 10% success rate on a good day.

Ask HN: Examples of large acquisitions that did not ruin the acquired company?

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