[Dave Heal's] Observations & Reports

Startup Templates: Acquisition Announcement Blog Post

…with Handy Founder-to-Employee Translation

This is the first in a series of Startup Templates designed to make it easier for you to publish some of the most commonly written pieces of startup copy. Why reinvent the wheel, I say!

[Ed: Cross-posted to Medium.]

This Is Just The Beginning

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” — Steve Jobs

To our friends and customers:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are joining forces with [Acquiring Company] and have entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired. The last [# of years since founding] years have been an incredible journey for[Acquired Company], full of ups and downs. But none of this would be possible without our amazing team and our [users/customers]. We couldn’t have done it without you.

We started [x] years ago with the idea that by combining [currently in vogue area of focus] and [extant but no longer sexy area of focus], we could change how you think about [mundane daily task].

I want to assure you that [main product that our customers love and cannot do their jobs without and/or have not been convinced to pay for] will remain [available and/or free] and that we are not going anywhere. Both [Acquired Company] and [Acquiring Company] share a vision to change the world by allowing you to [buzzword your buzzword’s buzzwords]. We have long admired [Acquiring Company]’s [flowery adjective indicating uniqueness] desire to craft value-add, customer-focused solutions while also building a great team and culture.

Going forward, I want to assure you that [Acquired Company] will still be the same old [Acquired Company] that you have grown to love. Our mission remains unchanged. We will simply have more resources to continue building products that delight our customers.

We are excited to share more about what we’ll be working on together in the coming months. The possibilities are [word suggesting implausible infinitude] and we are only just getting started…:)

Stay tuned!

In the meantime, please join us and the [Acquiring Company] Family for a webinar on [date].

Onwards and upwards,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], Founders

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions


Translation:

This Is The Beginning of The End But Some of Us Are Rich Now and Don’t Care.

“The [key emoji] is to enjoy life, because they don’t want you to enjoy life.” — DJ Khaled

To the families and friends of our employees, PR professionals, and the 42 people who still read TechCrunch:

Today I am pleased to announce that we are getting drunk before breakfast at a party we are throwing so our employees will think this acquisition is an unqualified good when it is likely so only for a small percentage of us.

The years since our founding have been full of stress-induced anal fissures and no small number of near-divorces and we have decided we need to chill the fuck out and get the VCs off our backs.

None of this would be possible without our amazing team. No, seriously, we *literally* couldn’t have done it without them. It’s really hard to build a venture-scale business as two dudes in a dorm room and if we had not been incredibly good salespeople with a plausibly good idea we never would have convinced this many talented, hard-working people to work here in exchange for free beer and soft t-shirts. We will be forever grateful and richer than you.

We started [x] years ago with one idea and then that kind of sucked and we were about to run out of money one night and spent 50 of our last dollars on mushrooms and drove [White Guy Name]’s leased Tesla into the desert and looked at the stars until we came up with another idea that we could repurpose our technology for and seemed different and maybe better but we couldn’t tell. Then we got TechCrunch to do a big write-up about how disruptive it was to a stodgy old industry that people secretly hated and we were off to the races!

That product became our bread and butter. And we are going to keep it available until such time as the press has mostly forgotten about us and it starts to get buggy and frustrating for our users, and then we’re going to write another blog post in this space announcing that it’s going to disappear and be folded into some boring, underfunded initiative with a crappy corporate name and a trademark.

We have no idea what a “solution” is, but we are going to grit our teeth through our vesting period while having a lot of 10am coffees with venture capitalists and talking incessantly but privately about our Next Thing.

[Acquiring Company]’s culture sucks real bad, and they acquired us in part to try and change that, but in actuality we are likely to be subsumed by the Borg. It’s really hard to change a large company’s culture. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We saw this coming during the negotiations and also because we’re not stupid, but [Acquiring Company] assured us things would change and really there is very little we can do.

Going forward, you’ll get to use our product until our corporate overlords decide that it no longer makes sense to offer it and we get asked to work on other stuff. Our mission will change whenever they say so because them’s the breaks! We have been promised more resources and the ability to remain autonomous, but keeping both those promises would obviate the need to do this deal at all and would mean that [Acquiring Company] is full of morons. So that’s probably not going to happen.

This deal is going to take a while to close and we’re not allowed to say anything even remotely interesting to you until that point. But we promise you a banal, substance-free update at least once before then. It seems highly unlikely that this acquisition will actually result in anything good for our existing customers or employees, but we do retain a shred of hope that we can prevent [Acquiring Company] from totally destroying what we’ve worked so hard to build.

Stay tuned!

If you sign up for our joint webinar, you should just go ahead and delete your account.

Up and to the right,

[White Guy Name] & [White Guy Name], TEDx Speakers and Burners Without Borders Executive Committee Members

Note that the transaction remains subject to satisfying customary closing conditions