It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.
Hackers and startups are two very different groups with very different ideologies and goals and incentives. No idea why you group them together. Some startups have no technical founders even.
>"change the world" and "make a difference"
Startups are businesses and like all businesses in the end they wish to make money. VCs, for example, are very clearly investors and not philanthropists. They are high risk, high reward businesses which means they need to change things to get those returns but in the end they are a business.
>How does selling to Visa accomplish those things?
It gives Plaid financial stability and long term platform for its technology. If its technology makes the world a better place then its continual existence does make a difference.
> Some startups have no technical founders even.
Hackers in the sense that I mean it have an innate need to understand things deeply, and a tendency to value achieving this directly (e.g. do something, don't just read up about it). As a result most hackers with any real talent will have achieved an unusually high level of expertise/mastery in at least one, often a few, technical areas. This is a result of having really spent a lot of time with it, in ways that may look "obsessive" to others.
This is by no means restricted to software. Another common characteristic is a tendency to take things apart (physically or virtually) to see how they tick.
Tech workers want to buy homes and go on vacations just like everyone else. That's a good thing. They had an opportunity to make a lot of money making banking services easier for everyone; that's awesome and should be encouraged.
Also, I question the general usefulness of startups created to pursue an exit in the first place. Besides there being often no point in entangling yourself with a service that's meant to be transient, the goals will be different too - the company will try to force hypergrowth by underhanded, and ultimately user-hostile means, vs. letting a thing grow on the strength of its usefulness. Myself, I strongly avoid dealing with any startup that I can smell was built for an exit.
In only one of those cases, did I join the company expecting an imminent-ish liquidity event. One hit me out of nowhere. Regardless of what you're planning on, and even if the dollar amount isn't that great, it's a huge rush, a lot of thinking about the possibilities. It would suck, at the very least, on an emotional level, to have that fall apart.
Incidentally, that company was also taken private during the dot-com crash, and I did make money from that, because the ESPP I was buying for <$1 got converted to cash at something like 3.5x the valuation. It wasn't much, but, again, I was young, so it seemed like a lot.
Is YouTube a failure? Is Instagram a failure? How about Github or Linkedin? There are reasons to remain an independent company, but there are also reasons that it might be better to be acquired. Besides the premium that the acquirer will pay, large companies can actually accelerate your growth while also insulating you from a lot of the pesky overhead of being a public company.
At least rappers have the honesty to say it's about that cash.
If you listen to VCs talk it is 100% about exit price.
That sounds like the goal of a non-profit, not a startup. What a founder says at a TED talk (which I admit can often sound like the former) shouldn't be conflated with the nuts and bolt conversations they have with their closest lieutenants and investors. Assuming we mean venture funded by "startup" the definition has always been growth oriented, highly risky and innovative through disruption.
> It's also kind of indicative of how small startup ambitions have become. Acquisition has become a measure of success, not failure.
Really? I'm surprised you think that acquisition is either a measure of success or failure in a vacuum. Wouldn't the terms and the specific deal be important than how a company exits? After all, there's a world of difference between an acquihire and a strategic merger.
If your aim is that everyone should have access to these tools then getting Visa to integrate them is a pretty good way to accomplish that - Visa is big enough that if they adopt something then pretty much every credit card will have to match it.
Also, I'm getting paid.
It's absolutely perfect to be passionate about customers/product/whatever. However, if one is constantly distracted trying to making ends meet the cognitive bandwidth is going to be spent on it rather than chasing the passion.
I care so little about "changing the world" or "making a difference". Those things don't pay the rent.
Plaid is probably worth much more now than it was when it was acquired. The entire market has become much more frothy.
I would not be surprised if it could command a $10B+ valuation as a standalone company.
with SPAC-mania they could merge with a SPAC or go public. my point is the path to going public is much easier now than a year ago.
Please don't call it a windfall. Anyone in that company that would have seen life changing amounts of money has likely put incredible effort and hard work into making this happen.
But it is most definitely a windfall to the rest of the world (even the rest of the country), who work equally hard, under worse conditions, for their entire lives and cannot even hope to earn say 1/5 the wealth that a tech worker can accumulate after his/her first job.
To have a payday of millions of $ fall out of the sky, for toiling the same as others trying to make a living, yet also being lucky to be in the right place and the right time to have it rewarded.
"Being in the right place at the right time" sure it's partly that but if you think you're getting there without some really hard work you'd be sorely mistaken.
Also startups everywhere need good folks to work for them it's not like this is some secret club to get into, many people just have no risk tolerance for one reason or another.
You're line of thinking really get's at me because the reality is a lot more than luck goes into things even if the current popular line of thinking is to suggest otherwise.
Especially on a community that was established initially to talk about startups.
But to imagine that suddenly having the fruits of your labor yield 10-100x the wealth that others in life can ever hope to produce, and think that it's just your hard work and not a function of having been blessed both with good talents and an environment in which your value can be exploited -- is sheer arrogance not to acknowledge that. Or be offended that someone points it out. What does being on HN have to do with keeping a sense of reality? We need to create a protective bubble of thought that doesn't offend millionaires?
As Warren Buffett has said, "I was born with a talent for capital allocation. If I had been born in rural Africa, my talents might never have given me the wealth I have today. I would not be so different from my secretary. Our positions might even be reversed. I thank America for that difference."
Maybe the word windfall triggers you in a way that suggests it should be taken away and you didn't "deserve it". No one said that. Yet also, everyone in such a fortunate position tends to grow to think they deserve it fully as a result of their talents and work. When in fact an objective person should see how much the factors have aligned to give you this gift.
Just because you read HN doesn't mean you are exempted from realizing how lucky you are. We're not that much of a bubble I hope.
Most people in startups are not lucky (relatively to others in the US economy of similar job positions) they actually generally make less than people in established companies and if they don't have a favorable exit are almost always numerically worse off than those who chose the stable path.
The reason I see people typically working in startups is more impact, freedom, the ability to quickly level up etc, but unless your company exits and you get paid from that exit no dice.
I've had friends who's shares were worth less than they paid for them when their company had an exit.
I continue to work in startups because I really find satisfaction in it, (right now trying to get my own off the ground) but I would triple my total compensation as an employee in most cases if I went to go work for one of the big players and that compensation is a real tangible thing not anywhere close of a gamble. It's actually somewhat of a problem right now in how do founders attract good talent for that reason.
I think you simply have an inaccurate picture of the majority of startups and the types of money in them.
I take the original comment at its word -- having to do with those workers for whom a "windfall" however you define it, is life-changing.
Larger companies will typically switch to RSUs, which get taxed like income, and isn't great for a non-liquid asset. Thats what double-trigger RSUs solve, by not having the employee own the shares until a liquidity event, they won't need to pay taxes on them until it happens. The catch is that now the employee needs to hold onto the shares for a year to get a more favorable tax treatment.
Taxes will really only take close to half if employees insist on selling their shares in less than a year.
If that applies to anyone here, my sympathies and best of luck figuring out what's next for Plaid. Hopefully the morale hit isn't too big on the team.