Ask HN: What's After Acquisition for a Founder?
2 comments
I am not a technical founder, more a product guy in between sales and engineering, but I was in a similar spot 4 years ago and about to leave, so here is my experience.
* we (~10 people) were acquired by/merged into Templafy (~80 people at the time, now over 350)
* first 1-2 years I kept me busy with learning everything in the new company, integrating everything and everyone into their new teams and growing our Berlin office.
* after that came the time to decide whether to take up formal responsibility in one of the departments, manage people etc. long story short I didn't, I loved the IC role, helped with tech prototypes and scouting, M&A
* after that I found two other projects that I found interesting and was in a unique position to help out with: one were internal tools for migrating customers from our monolith to micro-services system, then spend a couple of month with the data/analyst team.
* In the end I think the size of Templafy doesn't match my personal "ideal" organization size where I can be effective as a generalist, that's why I'm leaving.
>I am not sure how to transition from being a coder founder executive to Director or VP level executive.
I don't know much about you, but from my experience the overlap between "typical" founders and "typical" VP level executive is pretty small. So without knowing more I'd say you'll probably leave & start something new sooner or later :-)
That being said I still think you can have a great couple of years and contribute&benefit a lot, I just wouldn't worry too much if this turns out less permanent than you want it to be.
I'd probably rather approach it as "let's see where it takes me" not as "this is the starting point of me being an executive instead of a founder"
* we (~10 people) were acquired by/merged into Templafy (~80 people at the time, now over 350)
* first 1-2 years I kept me busy with learning everything in the new company, integrating everything and everyone into their new teams and growing our Berlin office.
* after that came the time to decide whether to take up formal responsibility in one of the departments, manage people etc. long story short I didn't, I loved the IC role, helped with tech prototypes and scouting, M&A
* after that I found two other projects that I found interesting and was in a unique position to help out with: one were internal tools for migrating customers from our monolith to micro-services system, then spend a couple of month with the data/analyst team.
* In the end I think the size of Templafy doesn't match my personal "ideal" organization size where I can be effective as a generalist, that's why I'm leaving.
>I am not sure how to transition from being a coder founder executive to Director or VP level executive.
I don't know much about you, but from my experience the overlap between "typical" founders and "typical" VP level executive is pretty small. So without knowing more I'd say you'll probably leave & start something new sooner or later :-)
That being said I still think you can have a great couple of years and contribute&benefit a lot, I just wouldn't worry too much if this turns out less permanent than you want it to be.
I'd probably rather approach it as "let's see where it takes me" not as "this is the starting point of me being an executive instead of a founder"
Thanks for sharing your experience. I am most likely going to launch something in a year or so. But I do want to give "career" a try lol. I wonder if going IC route from Distinguished Engineer is an option. I am not even sure what comes after that.
I was a technical founder and, as most founders do, I coded a lot in my startup life. I do miss that part but I am also looking at the next phase of my career now.
I am not sure how to transition from being a coder founder executive to Director or VP level executive.
Any other founder who went through something similar?