Comment by dataflow
5 years ago
> We make a fairly significant number of acquisitions and have never heard this directly before.
Isn't the comment about things you (purportedly) did personally? Have you "reached out about an acquisition, mined them for information playing along and then ghosted", or no? You clearly don't deny it but you object that you hadn't "heard" about bad things they claim... you did? For things you're the subject of, shouldn't it be easy to confirm or deny them just based on your own memory? It's not only a bizarre defense on its own, but it's an especially poor one when the claim is that you ghost people, and your reply is that they never tried to talk to you about it! Wouldn't it make more sense to just reject it and say you did not ghost people during acquisition talks, or fish for information under the guise of an acquisition, etc.?
Also:
> I don’t think some of the claims in this comment are true or in good faith.
"Some" leaves a lot to the reader's imagination. Which ones are the ones that are true?
I’m trying to not overstate my certainty. I have no idea what situation OP could be describing, and I have no recollection of anything along those lines, but I don’t want to definitively state that nothing like it happened over our decade of operation without knowing more about what’s actually being alleged.
We obviously never intentionally ghost companies, “mine them for information”, etc. The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior. (And we’ve invested in dozens.) But maybe some communication got dropped in some particular case or something? I don’t know.
Ah okay thanks for clarifying. It's a strong anonymous accusation, so being clear about it on your end helps a lot. I imagine it'll be hard for anyone here to know what happened.
I don't know anything about anything and am one of the very few people here who never founded a $xB fintech, but this strikes me as weak:
> The ecosystem is small and we wouldn’t be able to invest in and acquire companies if we didn’t have a reputation for good behavior
If you're in a position of power (and money), people will return your calls, regardless of rumors. This is true in all fields, from recruiting to publishing to VC deals, etc.
This is also a line of defense used by serial abusers who always (always!) claim that because they have had successful consensual relationships, there can't be cases where they abused the other party.
> over our decade of operation
Also weak. "We've done so many things. Seen so many people. It's been a long time. I don't recall. Things were different back then."
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That said -- weak defense is just that -- it doesn't mean offense.
The challenge I see with some phrases like "mined them" and "ghosted" is that they can be very subjective statements. The person on the receiving end may perceive the actions as such, whereas the person on the giving end may seem them differently.
I don't know what happened, just trying to point out that it is possible that a person felt slighted by certain actions and the person doing them may have no idea the other felt slighted and the person hasn't told them directly. But maybe they did, I don't know in this specific case.
But in that case he could just deny them and then mention that if it came across differently, he'd love for them to reach out. Not just skip to the second part!
Say if someone claims you stole their car (and the alternative could be that you borrowed it with someone else's permission, and they had no idea, so they felt it was stolen), would you reply with "I’d appreciate hearing from anyone who feels I stole their car", or would you first say "I never stole any car, please reach out to me if you know of any such incidents"? Wouldn't it be incredibly bizarre to ask them for a discussion session without first rejecting the premise?!
I think in the example of stealing a car is more binary: stole it or did not steal it. Maybe it could have been borrowed the car or something, but there would probably still be a more objective person in car event.
Whereas with ghosting, it could be not replying an email, could be not replying a text, could be some other thing the person missed and doesn't even know they missed. So it's hard to deny if the person isn't even aware they did it.
With mining, it could have been asking questions either live or in an email and not knowing the other person felt tricked into sharing more than they had wanted to.
I've taught a class called Emotional Self-Defense and one of the things I see the most is that the "attacker" often doesn't know they're attacking and the "victim" assumes it should be obvious the person is attacking.
What I'm saying is that he may not have any idea that his actions caused that much pain to the person. I had an ex girlfriend who said to me once, "and you don't respect my boundaries!" And I said what? And she said "yeah, 3 weeks ago when you were juggling the soccer ball and you kicked it to me, I said I didn't wanna play, and then a few minutes later you kicked it to me anyway." I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that she felt so angry/violated by me kicking the soccer ball with her the second time. If I had known, I almost certainly would have stopped. I just didn't receive the signal that strongly.
So I'm saying that may be the case here, too. It's also hard sometimes to tell someone in power that what they're doing is hurting or angering oneself.
18 replies →
This is a valid point. I've observed or been involved in a number of acquisitions at various distances over many years. There are any number of reasons an acquisition might not go ahead and, of course, as the potential acquirer you obviously learn some things that are useful, but I've never known a situation where there has been a deliberate plan to simply mine for knowledge or whatever.
The reality is some acquisitions are opportunistic, some are strategic, and even the opportunistic ones often have a strategic element. For a strategic acquisition, if it doesn't go ahead (comes down to ROI isn't perceived as being as good as potential alternatives), the almost inevitable outcome will often be (i) a different acquisition is eventually made, or (ii) the acquiring company decides to make an investment in that area themselves.
One of the ways to avoid getting "screwed over" as an acquiree is to ensure you've done the work beforehand to maximise the chances of compatibility with the acquirer: things like compliance, data protection, having a poor grasp of your numbers and financials, and other mundane matters (or combinations of them) can easily trip up the process.
When an acquisition does fall through for almost any reason it's pretty natural for the potential acquirees to feel rather bruised by the process: they've wasted their time, they've been screwed over, etc. Often that won't be the case although, I've no doubt, there are instances where it will be.
(Btw, in case it's not obvious, I know nothing about the activities of Stripe or its founders, good or bad.)