You make it sound like acquisition is an economic net negative.
Very simply, a healthy business creates value. It figures out how to do something people will pay more than cost for.
My hypothetical startup won't have the resources of a Google, but could be made much better if it did. Why is it unreasonable then to target acquisition as a way of ending my responsibility for nurturing the business and handing it off to another party?
Your hypothetical business is clearly not built on the requirement of an exit as the only path to success (unless you and I have a profoundly different definition of the word "healthy").
If the business is healthy and you simply want more resources to scale, it absolutely makes sense to entertain an acquisition.
But if you start up knowing full well that the only path to success is through acquisition (that is the idea, on its own, cannot be used to build a sustainable, going concern), then you're simply gambling and contributing to the speculative bubble that is the Valley.
And you're also a heck of a lot more likely to fail.
But if you start up knowing full well that the only path to success is
through acquisition (that is the idea, on its own, cannot be used to build a
sustainable, going concern), then you're simply gambling and contributing to
the speculative bubble that is the Valley.
I disagree. Startups, these days, is how corporate R&D is performed. Yeah, it's easy to look at the most prominent startups and say that it's all froth. But there are a surprising number of hardware and software startups that are trying to tackle problems in hardware and biology. Very few of these startups have an exit strategy that involves becoming a public company. It's all about developing a viable product (not necessarily a viable business), and then shopping the company out to potential acquirers.
Is there a problem with people whose only goal is to acquire a lot of money? Not everyone wants to build a benevolent company that makes the world a better place - some people just want to be rich.
