An acquired company's owners also get to pocket whatever the purchase price of the company was, less investors' take. Sweet deal! You get paid for your "company" and you also all get jobs! A team-hired group foregoes this, unless they negotiate an up-front "team acquisition fee".

And two programmers that work well together isn't equivalent to two technical co-founders that work well together.

It also skips the part where the team being hired gets a large signing bonus.

I'd imagine any smart working team would negotiate this heavily. This setup appeals heavily to someone like me (with 2 other people specifically), but I would also be personally be asking for $300k+ salaries for each person + signing bonus + RSUs. It would be a happy medium between a lengthy and pricey acquihire and getting 3 developers/PM people who you know already will work well together.

I'd recommend that anyone doing this that they negotiate their salaries very heavily.

What experience are you drawing on for that recommendation? Big companies don't typically negotiate wildly on salary, as it's tied to a leveling system that breaks too many things if your numbers don't fit. They would have to negotiate on levels and make everyone VPs to meet your salary demands, which would cause other problems. So, this might not be the best advice. Acquihirees get a few knobs to turn, but salary is the least turnable.

> * What experience are you drawing on for that recommendation?*

I work on tech M&A.

Is your experience different from mine then? You do see companies negotiating on salary?

Is there that much room for a company like Strike to negotiate on salary? I hope they're that entrepreneurial.

For better or worse, I've seen large companies sometimes acquihire (amongst other reasons) as a way to pay up without killing their salary bands.

Sure, but an (acqui)hiring bonus is balanced by the time spent creating the acquired company. I'd think of it as being part signing bonus and part back pay.