100%

This is complicated during acquisitions… you have a new company coming in and leveling them is hard because it’s a mass title migration exercise, and nobody wants to be down-titled.

In the 2 examples I’ve seen gone wrong:

-the people at the parent company look at the acquisition’s team and think, “there’s no way this idiot should be a director.”

-the people at the startup think they’re geniuses because they got acquired but their tech is crap and they’re actually just 28 year olds running around without adult supervision

-the startup guys will all leave once they vest or be pushed out for being lousy

-the tech gets even more unstable because no one left knows how the code works

In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up front they have to assume that all the code will need to be rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few key technical resources around during the transition period but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.