I was in the spot of one of the employees (contractor at the time) for a further along startup that run out of money and wasn't going to get further investments. It looked like the owner of the company was under mega stress during this time, and so was I, because I was waiting on hypothetical buyers to float us cash while they did their due diligence.

What ended up happening, after months of being in the dark, was that most of company was absorbed into the new parent, but somewhat at arms-length. We weren't put on the standard engineering track of the parent because most of the remote employees were working through Remote Inc (a proxy).

The CEO and leadership changed immediately, maybe sticking around in some kind of advisory role for at most a month, and are now all at others.

I got caught in round 2 of layoffs, so managed about 8 months of true employment or so. They eventually renamed the product, and many of the engineers are still there afaik.

It could have been worse, I suppose, the package was less than I was making as a contractor but more stable. Things got more bureaucratic pretty quickly, more long arbitrary meetings that were very difficult to keep up with and more pointless than I'd ever seen.