The Acquihire Market for Early Stage Startups is Ice Cold. One Better Strategy? Announce You’re For Sale.

“Worst case scenario we’ll sell to a larger startup or public company for about ~$1.5m per engineer.” Yes, this was the ‘fallback plan’ for many team in the web2 era and they weren’t wrong. Especially in the early days of mobile/iOS engineering, if you hired strong technical talent into your early stage company, you basically created an acquisition outcome floor. I was on both sides of these transactions — buying startups for Google/YouTube and angel investing in high quality…