I am deeply skeptical of the author’s conclusions to the point of being skeptical of their motive.
These HALO type acquisitions are awful for the tech industry and this trend is deeply concerning to me.
1. The author fails to consider the impact of this kind of acquihire on the company’s customers. We’ve already seen Scale AI have a dramatic change in customer behavior post hire. Windsurf was a real company with real revenue. How many of those customers want to use a product with a much less predictable future now? Where the team was basically disembowled?
2. The creation of a “class hierarchy” both within and between companies has a dis-spiriting king-maker vibe. 1/5 of the company ascends to heaven through this process and the other 4/5 is left to manage a shell corp? How is that supposed to feel?
3. The concept of windsurf rebuilding their product in google land is laughable. What product will they build but the same thing they already built? And windsurf is nowhere near the velocity of Cursor, so theyve burned months of time doing this and they’ll burn months more adapting to the new environment. How does this square with the thesis of google wanting their talent? Lets be real about the reason google bought windsurf — they got a discount from the $3B OpenAI acquisition and most of all — they wanted to fuck OpenAI. At this point, I would guess that these companies would do whatever they can to harm OpenAI, given the sheer velocity of their product and how terrified everyone is of them discovering something very soon.
4. I haven’t seen any example of a successful post-acquisition company operation. Inflection? Covariant? Character? What’s happened to these companies post change? Are all employees on strict NDAs? Why has nobody written about what it was like?
5. The conclusion I see here is straightforward — in a post AI economy, very very few people are “important” to these companies. The top 10 largest corporations in the world will basically be competing over a pool of ~5k individuals and everyone else is irrelevant.
If there’s anything that makes me wish we were living in Lina Khan’s world it’s this.
These HALO type acquisitions are awful for the tech industry and this trend is deeply concerning to me.
1. The author fails to consider the impact of this kind of acquihire on the company’s customers. We’ve already seen Scale AI have a dramatic change in customer behavior post hire. Windsurf was a real company with real revenue. How many of those customers want to use a product with a much less predictable future now? Where the team was basically disembowled?
2. The creation of a “class hierarchy” both within and between companies has a dis-spiriting king-maker vibe. 1/5 of the company ascends to heaven through this process and the other 4/5 is left to manage a shell corp? How is that supposed to feel?
3. The concept of windsurf rebuilding their product in google land is laughable. What product will they build but the same thing they already built? And windsurf is nowhere near the velocity of Cursor, so theyve burned months of time doing this and they’ll burn months more adapting to the new environment. How does this square with the thesis of google wanting their talent? Lets be real about the reason google bought windsurf — they got a discount from the $3B OpenAI acquisition and most of all — they wanted to fuck OpenAI. At this point, I would guess that these companies would do whatever they can to harm OpenAI, given the sheer velocity of their product and how terrified everyone is of them discovering something very soon.
4. I haven’t seen any example of a successful post-acquisition company operation. Inflection? Covariant? Character? What’s happened to these companies post change? Are all employees on strict NDAs? Why has nobody written about what it was like?
5. The conclusion I see here is straightforward — in a post AI economy, very very few people are “important” to these companies. The top 10 largest corporations in the world will basically be competing over a pool of ~5k individuals and everyone else is irrelevant.
If there’s anything that makes me wish we were living in Lina Khan’s world it’s this.