It is the moment a company with 3,000 engineers announces it needed to buy 30 engineers to ship a feature.
And the moment those 30 engineers announce they would rather have the money now than the product later.
𝘉𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘪𝘵 𝘴𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘨𝘺. 𝘐𝘵 𝘪𝘴 𝘢𝘭𝘴𝘰 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘧𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘢 𝘣𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘮𝘢𝘨𝘦.
𝐇𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐣𝐨𝐤𝐞
Every acquisition announcement is two press releases in one. The official one says synergy, vision, accelerated roadmap. The unofficial one says two quieter things.
From the buyer: “We could not build this ourselves.” Not in time, not with our engineering culture, not at a cost the board would accept. Buying a product to fix your platform is like fixing your kitchen by buying the neighbour’s house. Technically you now own a working kitchen. It is just in a different building, the plumbing does not connect, and the chef quit during the inspection.
From the seller: “We did not believe in the next five years.” Nobody sells a product that is compounding. Founders do not sell rocket ships. They sell planes that stopped climbing. The price is the diagnosis.
Our industry produced two of these announcements in the last few weeks. One was a ten-million-dollar bolt-on: an app, a message hub, and the word AI. One was a legacy giant buying a startup’s brain and calling it a vision. Read both press releases again with the unofficial translation in mind.
But this spring delivered my personal favourite, a rare third confession. An airport co-founded an operations platform, built it on its own runways, and then sold its half to the outsourcing partner. In the same announcement that declared the product “ready for commercial scaling.” The platform was supposed to end outsourcing dependence. In the end, even the ownership got outsourced.
Think about that sequence. The one customer the product was purpose-built for looked at the rocket ship, heard it was about to take off, and chose that exact moment to hand over the keys and walk back to the terminal. That is not an exit. That is a review.
Then ask your vendor one question: which parts of this platform did you build, and which parts did you buy? Every acquired part is a seam. Seams are where your 3 a.m. disruption recovery leaks. As for us, eleven years in, we have never bought a product and never sold one. Not on principle. People do ask. But every time I look at our growth curve, the math never favours the exit.