Comment by nkoren

Ouch.

So, my startup is positioning itself as a kind of "GitHub for X". When investors ask about our exit strategy, I have to be honest and say that acquisitions the big platform players in the space are largely ruled out; if we are to remain a neutral networking medium within our market, we can't be biased -- or even the suspicion of bias -- towards any particular company within that market.

To illustrate this, the example I've always use is: "Could GitHub still be GitHub if it was acquired by Microsoft? Of course not: a meaningful subset of its userbase could then no longer trust the platform to be a neutral intermediary, and the resulting exodus -- even if small -- would have a corrosive knock-on effect with regards to overall networking effect lock-in. So such an acquisition could never happen, because it would too obviously destroy value."

Didn't expect to have the opportunity to validate that particular hypothesis!