So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount

I wonder how the initial investors feel about the aqui-hire path... Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it, or they saw that the path to any revenue was near impossible/non-existant

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drewda 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In many cases the acquiring company shares investors or board members with the acqui-hired entity.

To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.

To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.

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thethimble 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.

No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.

Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.

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seanclayton 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Vite isn't a product. It's a tool. It will be succeeded if necessary. It happened to Webpack after Microsoft hired the creator, and the JS community pivoted hard. Bundlers and compilers in the JS world happen once a decade it appears.

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sophacles an hour ago | parent [-]

I was at the hardware store this morning. I bought a hammer. It sure seemed like a product... with the whole "being displayed on store shelves" and "available for purchase" thing.

There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.

I don't quite get the distinction...

	▲	senordevnyc 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You paid for the hammer. Did you pay for Vite?

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sofixa 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.

A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.

And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.

	▲	benoau an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is the kind of problem I think only UBI solves because there is no apparent business model that can sustain ~20 employees working on software like this, they need to make at least a couple million a year to pay those people!

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overfeed 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Must be a pretty nice sum for them to agree to it

Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.

In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.

	▲	bix6 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Not necessarily. There are likely key person clauses in the prior round docs.

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stackskipton 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess is investors are getting a good return on investment so they are probably pretty happy.

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yuppiepuppie 3 hours ago | parent [-]

They've raised over $16 million [0]. For a decent 3-5x return for that, they would need to have been acquired for around ~$50 million. For a team of 19 [1], thats around $2.5 million per employee for Cloudflare. Worth it? no idea

[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about

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stackskipton 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I could see Cloudflare wanting them for 50 Million. Cloudflare recent acquisitions have clearly been "buy tools with heavy lock in" and companies shipping on Void are likely heavily locked in.

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benoau 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Isn't their revenue just sponsorships and donations? This seems like a company destined to scrape by despite their popularity, like Tailwind. You don't get $50 million for that.

	▲	ameliaquining 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		void.cloud was their revenue plan, but it was still in private beta at this point.

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bix6 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Presumably that $12M A was around $50M Val so they need to sell for substantially more to give investors a multiple return.

	▲	throwup238 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Unless the investors have liquidation preference where they see their multiple before anyone else sees a dime.

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debarshri 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Acquisition happen for 3 reasons.

1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth

In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product.

In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team.

You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.

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bflesch an hour ago | parent [-]

Your listing is not exhaustive - startups can also be acquired for politics, for marketing purposes, whatever. There is a lot of meat space things going on in the upper echelons of the US tech industry.

Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.

	▲	sophacles an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Rarely does one acquire dollars for the sake of having dollars. Dollars are power tokens, and the acquisition of them beyond a certain point is almost always accompanied by a motive.

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rconti 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I mean, the alternative is a whole bunch of BS dealing with funding, global compliance and sales, public markets, etc.

It's more fun to just build the fun bits, get acquired, walk away with a lot of money, and start over again doing the fun bits (if you want to keep working).

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> So is the business model of these projects - 1. build a popular dev tool 2. aquire funding 3. hire great talent 4. pray for an aqui-hire that justifies the initial funding amount

Indeed, so as a library/framework/engine/runtime user, for the last decade or so, I've basically avoided anything that touched VC-investments, as eventually the tool will either degrade, get too expensive or straight up disappear, and I got so tired of having to refactor and move stuff around just because new owner did something shitty.