Anyone who worked at a startup then got acquired by a big company?

I was working in a startup, but I left only after a couple of years. 😅 That startup got acquired by a big company some years after I left.

My co-workers who stayed till the acquisition, their life changed in two ways at acquisition:

1. Each of them got USD $1 million cash in exchange for the e-sops / equity they owned

2. On acquisition, their salaries immediately got doubled by the acquiring company, in line with the company's salary bands

So there, that's how lives change on acquisition. 😄

I was working with a startup that got funded in Dec 2019. Few months later COVID started. Our funds lasted till Oct 2020. Then our whole team was acquired by our biggest client.

They created a dept for us in their company. Initially it felt like switch from Lamborghini to Maruti 800 workwise. At startup, everything happens so quickly. But at a full fledged IT company, i was shocked with the "raise a ticket" culture. Even small permission requires tickets. Everything slowed down. Small things took days. This eventually affected my work. I got tardy and couldn't work for more than 1 hr continuously as compared to hours at startup.

Yeah, but don’t expect much. I have never heard any employees making a huge sum from this. It’s usually the founding engineers who gets privileges to convert their Esops.

How did it change lives? Dude brace for impact, role can be declared as 'redundant'. Start running!

I have 3 acquisition experiences:

1. ESOPs liquidated. Some people made crores and some made lakhs.
2. Salaries matched to existing employees + all benefits
3. Slow down due to processes & approvals
4. Consolidation of teams & applications which might make you redundant over 1.5-2 years.

My friend IIT madara MTech was working in a startup earning 25LPA got laid off with severance of 6 months when it got acquired by google

Worked in a small hyperlocal media startup for 6-7 months as their only Android engineer . The startup failed to raise series funding and was later acquired by one of the largest news aggregator in the country . I was naive at the time hence didn’t had any esop options and there wasn’t much of a salary increment too. Left after 3 months to join another organisation

More context: We are a super small team less than 10 employees

I had an experience where the company was acquired by a corporate. Usually the news hit way before, but the acquisition part takes forever. For us it took about 2.5 years two get the email id. Nothing changed, except the ceos of the start up stepped down. I’m guessing they were paid like crazy. Still use the same start email id and no extra benefits added

Went through two acquisitions.

There was always a salary hike, some sum from the equity (life changing for early employees) but what majorly mattered was our ability to establish ourselves inside the company, create relationships and value. The leadership is not always going to show you the way to do that.

Most of my colleagues from the first acquisition and still in the same company, only a couple switched to startups. While the second acquisition, most people except the founders and founder -1s have been laid off.

But generally work slows down, politics increase, some people might give up and switch for smaller teams while some will enjoy the perks if they get any.