I have been part of an acquihire. As an early stage startup employee you work really hard for years, take salary cuts and hope that some day all the hard work will pay off. All of it will be for nothing if there isn't some kind of success/validation. In this case Digg was fairly well known but you don't get much credibility in the job market if the startup was never in the news. So if there is any form of acquisition, you get some of that brand exposure. In my case, even though we had built a great product, I rarely got inbound calls or interest in public forums. Now people reach out to me even when I haven't spent much time in the new company