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A comment on Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It?. Parent comment

Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by icedchai on Saturday October 04, 2025 @09:49PM (#45478253)
$500K ARR often sounds more impressive than it is. How much of that is profit? Probably not much. Every SaaS startup I've worked for was bleeding money on cloud costs and employees.

Even after all the layoffs and cost-cutting one of them went through, the end result was mediocre paying jobs for a few people at most, with constant on call and fire fighting. One ended in a "acquisition", which was actually a pennies-on-the-dollar fire sale, with no payouts to the founder or any employees. The former CEO still talks up the big acquisition. It sounds like success if you ignore all the details.

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by Aurornis on Sunday October 05, 2025 @11:35AM (#45482321)
> One ended in a "acquisition", which was actually a pennies-on-the-dollar fire sale, with no payouts to the founder or any employees. The former CEO still talks up the big acquisition. It sounds like success if you ignore all the details.

This happens a lot. A company wants to recruit someone who has good skills but has been trying, unsuccessfully, to get their own startup off the ground. They offer an "acquisition" on paper which purchases the company and brings them into the company for a token amount. This gives the founder an easy out, a job, a hiring bonus, and a way to update their LinkedIn to show that they built and "sold" a company.

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Re:Five Years as a Startup CTO: How, Why, and Was It Worth It? by icedchai on Tuesday October 07, 2025 @09:50AM (#45503052)
Yes. Whenever someone says they "had an acquisition", I take it with a grain of salt. The majority of the time it's an acqui-hire or fire sale with a neutral or negative outcome.
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