Once you take VC money, your “mission statement” is meaningless. You no longer have the luxury of being a lifestyle business. You either have to get acquired or statistically unlikely go public.
>Eventually, all startups will be acquired into the FAANG companies,
That fatalistic sentiment is often repeated but it's not inevitable that all startups will be acquired by bigger companies. The missing gap in that thinking is that people forget that the startup's founders have free will and must willingly agree to being acquired. I made previous comments about this with examples:
>But do they have free will if their startup is majority owned by VC funds?
Yes. Even if the VCs control the majority of board seats and voting rights of the startup, companies like Google/Facebook/Amazon/Microsoft are not in the business of doing hostile takeovers with uncooperative founders. Yes, hedge funds will do that but not FAANG companies.
Typically, it's always a friendly deal and they want to lock in cooperative founders with "golden handcuffs" -- e.g. 4-year stock vesting, etc. So yes, even if the startup founders have less voting power, they're still in the driver's seat in multiple ways.
Can anyone think of an example where a FAANG acquired a startup with uncooperative startup founders? I guess it's possible that there's a startup out there and the only thing valuable about the company is its patent portfolio and FAANG doesn't care about the founders skill sets at all. In such a scenario, I guess they could collude with the VCs and override the founders to buy the startup. I just can't think of such an example.
The point still remains: if you're a startup founder, you can listen to the offers from Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, when they come calling -- but that doesn't mean you have to accept it and sell. Even though billions of dollars being waved in your face is persuasive, many founders have egos and like them, maybe you don't want to report to LP/MZ/JB as your new boss. Part of the joy of running your own company is that you're not someone's subordinate and you don't have to follow the agenda of a manager above you.
Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google. Although, it might be more appropriate to call Google 'Alphabet' now. But FNAAA doesn't have as much of a ring to it.
frankly, Microsoft deserves to be in there at this point, so that would end up being FANAMA for Facebook,Apple,Netflix,Amazon,Microsoft,Alphabet and it's easier to pronounce to boot
Pebble -> Fitbit -> Google.
I am sure there are more examples.