Q: What happens to employees after your startup gets acquired?
It varies. But as a rule:
- Top engineers will all be given retention packages, extra money / RSUs / options designed to keep them for 2-4 years.
- All engineers and product people will want to be kept.
Then, either:
- They’ll want to keep everyone for a while; or
- They won’t see the value in keeping sales, marketing, finance, etc. for anything longer than a transition period, and either won’t agree to hire all of them, or will transition them out post-acquisition.
