Ben Gilbert: commitment

Transcript context

…Yeah, we’ve waxed philosophical on that too. Go ahead. You want to do yours quickly and then I’ll jump in with a couple? Yeah. So it's interesting that companies acquiring former employees. When we started Acquired, as long-time listeners now, we do this to try and find common threads between successful acquisitions to really understand what makes a successful acquisition so that as we build companies in the earliest stages, how can we build with those things in mind, that you need a very successful integration or very successful IPO and you don’t want to build something that’s great early and then sucks when it’s acquired or something. So one thing that I totally thought was going to be a theme that we have only seen once besides this episode is companies acquiring people that used to work for them. And that previous one is Steve Jobs and NeXT. We talked about that it could happen in the Jet episode where like potentially Marc Lore could end up back at Amazon and there’s a bidding war with Walmart because Walmart really wanted to keep Jet out of the hands of Amazon. But like we really haven’t seen it and if you would have asked me a couple of years ago, like is that a common thread of someone leaving the company, starting a thing and it getting bought and bringing them back in. It seemed like it was a common thing but it has not been the predominant story of these very successful IPOs that we’ve been talking about or these very successful acquisitions. If anything, it’s kind of the opposite. I wonder if, you know, I think a lot of big tech companies are buying companies that are started by people from their rivals. Like I think about Facebook buying Instagram and obviously that is our benchmark here at Acquired. I mean, there is even as Instagram just continues to crush it, I mean that is going to go down as one of the best purchases of all time in any industry, technology or otherwise. But, you know, Kevin says the term came from Google and there’s so much Google DNA that has come into Facebook through acquisitions and, similarly, Apple DNA into Google or Facebook and Amazon or what-have-you.…

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