Aug 24, 2026
On how to succeed at an acquirer post-acquihire. First, a very brief story from my first day at Stripe:
I met @patrickc I think on Sat and he said something like "hey we need someone to lead a thing but it's starting _now_, can you come Monday?" I excitedly show up on Monday. I don't have a badge and no one knows me.
security: who are you?
me: um... we got acquired and I'm supposed to start...
security: oh wow ok. Um, so... are you visiting someone?
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This ^^ is a surprisingly great metaphor for acquihires:
- scaling startups have endless 0->1 (or 0.5->2 or whatever) opportunities. But reliably hiring talent capable of developing these is very difficult. That's why they acquired you
- you're joining a normal company with a front desk, career ladders, risks to manage, compliance to consider, a boss (who's worried about their own career), etc. You'll need to slot into a defined role, fill out annual performance reviews, use Jira, sign in your lunch guests, and so on
- coming in through an acquisition gives you a little extra clout with everyone (emphasis on little). But not nearly enough to ignore any of the normal structure
- for the same reason you'll have extra eyes on you. If you perform, your clout accumulates faster than normal. But if you screw up, it unwinds faster than normal too
- and so, the right way to think of yourself post-acquihire is as a perfectly normal employee but with initial credibility preloaded
- the founders are the only people in the company with the privilege to bypass normal structure. (One surprising consequence of this is they don't always carry the experience of operating within the structure since they're not fully bound by it themselves)
- you have to get good at all the normal skills needed to cooperate effectively with large groups of ppl. Building shared context, working with different functions, building relationships, negotiating win/win outcomes with ppl who have different goals and incentives from you, involving the right stakeholders in decisions, etc. If you don’t have these skills, find a mentor and develop them asap
- all the advice I wrote for starting any other job applies here (link in the comments, but tldr: start small, talk to ppl, deliver great work fast, pick smtg bigger, repeat indefinitely)
Some more important stuff:
- ppl might look at you a little funny. They don’t mean anything by it, they’re just trying to figure out what the founder saw in you
- if you were acquihired you probably weren't on a great trajectory, and thus were in starvation mode for a while. The acquirer is on a great trajectory and is in abundance mode. These modes are very different and require very different mindsets. The quicker you leave starvation mindset behind and start thinking in terms of abundance, the more successful you'll be
- if you're genuinely good at 0->1 and have the skills to coordinate large groups to scale 1->n, there is no limit to what you can accomplish. There are endless opportunities, energy and capital to recruit great talent, existing infrastructure to help scale up, customer credibility and relationships, etc.
- as an aside, this is a tremendous opportunity to learn. Go talk to everybody, learn about their backgrounds, learn about what they do, learn how their role works. At some point I read a random article about account payables fraud (when ppl send a fraudulent bill to e.g. Meta and Meta just writes them a check) so I badgered our accounting ppl and learned a huge amount about how all that works out of sheer curiosity. You can do this for pretty much anything