It's time for some Friday fun. The following list was sparked in part by my hatred of the term "acquihire" (which no matter how many times I try to train myself, I can never say it correctly in my head when I read it).
Hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed coming up with them.
10 Types of Acquisitions
1. Backuisition: A few rogue employees from BigCo went off and started their own company (NotAsBigCo) a couple of years ago. The CEO never got over it, so worked out a deal acquire their startup to get them back.
2. Crackuisition: BigCo is addicted to acquisitions. If more than a few weeks go by where some sort of deal isn't consummated, the twitching and shakes start. They need their “fix”. Like right now. Before somebody gets hurt.
3. Hackuisition:
BigCo: “How many hackers do you have?”
NotSoBigCo: “You mean programmers?”
BigCo: “No, we need more hackers. People that read The Hacker News blog. Do you have hackers?”
NotAsBigCo: “Um, sure, we have hackers…”
BigCo: “Great! We need to get ourselves some hackers.”
4. Sackuisition: This is a deal that's all about the customers or the IP or anything other than the people. Once the deal is done, most of the people get laid off. [Not to be confused with the deal where most of the people get laid. That's the mythical, inthesackuisition]
5. Shaquisition: BigCo has a company basketball team consisting mostly of white guys that can't jump. They're embarrassed and want to remedy that.
6. Packuisition: Executives in corporate development at BigCo are used to traveling a lot. For some reason, they looked at their calendar and saw that there were 3 straight weeks with no travel coming up. This would drive them and their family insane. So, they go off looking for an out-of-town acquisition to do. Choice of potential company to acquire depends primarily on two variables: weather and availability of golf courses.
7. Snackuisition: BigCo tends to do really, really big deals. The kind that get written up in all the newspapers and magazines (and also, in something called “blogs” that the executives have heard of). But these big deals sometimes take time, and in-between, their blood sugar can get low.
8. Knackuisition: When a deal is done because the company being acquired has a particularly valuable and rare knack for doing something. Like building operating systems. Or natural voice recognition algorithms. Or the ability to use MongoDB successfully while resisting the temptation to eventually simulate SQL-like features.
9. Attackuisition: A deal that's done specifically to attack another company in a particular industry, primarily out of spite and CEO arrogance.
10. Frackuisition: When the value trying to be extracted from the deal is so deep, it requires knowledge of hydraulics and a really good PR firm to convince the world that you're not going to destroy the company, the industry and the world in the process of getting to this value.
Do you have any of your own that you think I missed?