Slashdot Mirror
What To Do When a Megacorp Wants To Buy You?
Anonymous Entrepreneur writes "I run a small technology startup company; so small that our offices are still located in a room in my home. We are just some young friends, fresh from college, and we haven't started having regular sales, as 99% of our time is invested in development. A large corporation has just approached us, trying to persuade us to sell our company. The money is fair enough, and the employment conditions would seem excellent, since they would enable us to manage good-sized motivated teams, but we are very emotionally attached to our development and we place great importance to being independent. We founded our company because we didn't want to follow rules. We wanted to be the ones who make the rules instead. Money really doesn't mean much to us as long as we can do whatever we want while excelling at our passions. We feel that by accepting the offer, we couldn't achieve the maximum of our potential, and one of us joked that if we get in contact with the corporate environment and accept their money, we risk becoming lazy. Another member is more pragmatic, saying that accepting some money now is better than waiting for the development to go gold, even though all of us agree that if we finished our thing, we'd earn more than what the corporation has offered us. We would be very interested to know your thoughts and viewpoints, especially if you have ever faced a similar dilemma."
You think a few million will cover that? I think not.
Of course it will. Get the money, transfer it out of the USA to the Caymans or Luxembourg, and move to a nice beautiful discrete villa on the outskirts of some major city in or near a cocaine-producing country where the blow is cheap. Like say, Lima Peru.
Marry a beautiful young proper landed old-family upper-class girl who likes to have sex and who's family is experiencing a cash flow problem. Learn Spanish, meet your neighbors, learn the local customs, go to local cultural events, have your wife's family and friends teach you all that you need to say and do to be treated respectfully in your newly-adopted country. Go to Mass once or twice a year. Make some noticeable donations to local respected charities. Make a few unnoticeable donations to local police department's widows and orphans fund. Keep up appearances and indulge your appetites discretely. Know your limits but keep expanding them.
Do this and your millions will last a long, long time. Party Hardy, dude.
EMC purchased a small IT service management company and screwed the directors. And EMC are actually not to bad as a mega-corporation (except they are inefficient, and don't give very good service to their customers). Yes, the directors got a lot of money, but unfortunately for at least one of them, they had expected to stay on and help manage the company to greater heights. They all got shafted and soon left. If you want to continue to have a hand in managing your teams, then I would advise not selling the company. If you don't mind leaving and starting up another company, go for it. Just make very sure a competent lawyer reads the contracts so you can, in fact, start a similar company, or a company within the same field!
Oh, and I'm going to post this anonymously, though I suspect that I've said enough that I can be identified. But you have been warned!