Acquihire Acquisition
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An Acquihire Acquisition is an acquisition that consists primarily of recruiting a company's employees rather than gaining control of its products or services.
- AKA: Acqui-Hiring, Talent Acquisition.
- Context:
- It can range from being an Acquihiri Under-Duress.
- Example(s):
- Google, Inc.'s acquihire of Slide.com for $182M on August 10, 2010 in part to hire Max Levchin.
- Facebook, Inc.'s acquihire of FriendFeed for $47M on August 10, 2009 in part to hire Bret Taylor.
- …
- Counter-Example(s):
- See: Neologism, Merger, Acquisition, Recruitment, Business Insider, Exit Strategy, Venture Capital, Startup Company, Technology.
References
2022
- (Wikipedia, 2022) ⇒ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acqui-hiring Retrieved:2022-1-17.
- Acqui-hiring or Acq-hiring (a portmanteau of "acquisition" and "hiring", also called talent acquisition ) is a neologism which describes the process of acquiring a company primarily to recruit its employees, rather than to gain control of its products or services. Ben Zimmer traced the derivation of the phrase to a blog post in May 2005. Talent acquisitions can provide a relatively favorable exit strategy for employees, with the prestige of being bought by a larger company, combined with the typical process of hiring. "The Vanity of the "Acqhire": Why Do a Deal That Makes No Sense?". All Things D. Retrieved 23 May 2013.</ref> A risk to talent acquisitions are employees that are not interested in working within a corporate environment — which may cause them to defect elsewhere. By the early 2010s, acqui-hiring had become increasingly common in venture capital-backed startup companies, especially within the competitive technology sector (where skilled software engineers working for startups were considered lucrative). By March 2013, Facebook was the largest performer of talent acquisitions, with 12 over the previous five fiscal quarters. One such Facebook purchase in 2009, FriendFeed, brought several high-profile Google alumni into the company, including Bret Taylor — who became Facebook's chief technology officer shortly after the purchase. Wagner, Kurt (2015-03-09). "Facebook Officially Shuts the Door on FriendFeed". Recode. Retrieved 2019-04-19.</ref> Twitter, Yahoo!, and Google ranked alongside Facebook as a similarly major user of talent acquisitions. Typically, a company that performs a talent acquisition does not show an interest in the products and services of the target, which results in them being discontinued upon the purchase (so that their staff will focus exclusively on incorporating their knowledge into their new employer's projects) or some time afterward. The file sharing service Drop.io was shut down after its 2010 purchase by Facebook, while FriendFeed was left dormant (with no new feature development and a slowly shrinking user base) until 2015, when it was discontinued.