Making the Best of Your Time Resting and Vesting

First, go on vacation for a few weeks, to the south of France or something. For a while, you will likely focus on ensuring your team lands nicely and navigating integration processes. You could try climbing the corporate ladder, but you probably won’t if you plan to start another company.

After a few months, you’ll wonder what to do with yourself while you wait for a vesting cliff or finish building your dream home. You can do several valuable things at a large company while resting and vesting.

Find the other acquired coworkers.

You probably weren’t the first acquisition. Find out what other companies were acquired and who is still around. They will help you maximize your time. Shared experiences build relationships, and the acquisition you completed is nothing if not an experience.

Get to know customers and field people and learn their problems.

Customers are the key to startup success, and you may have had great customers at the company you just sold. Your acquirer will have more customers, more significant customers, more diverse customers, and more complex projects. Get involved. Often you’ll be able to do a road show of the newly acquired product or technology, and that’s a great time to meet customers. Meet the top field people in sales or services. These will be valuable contacts at the big company, they can keep getting you in front of customers, and they might even want to work for you later. While you are meeting customers, you will almost automatically absorb what other adjacent problems they have which are going unsolved.

Learn what the company is good at, and get good at it too.

The large company that acquired you is probably successful for reasons other than dumb luck. They are uniquely good in the industry at certain things. Figure out those things, and see what you can learn about them. For example, Tableau has unique approaches to the iterative design of new product features. Tableau has people who are staggeringly good at crafting demos and coaching speakers to give good demos. Many large tech companies are great at enterprise sales, relationship management, delivering consulting, or customer success. Yours might be great at recruiting or product launches. Figure out their superpower and spend a few months learning as much as possible.

Engage with corporate development and corporate ventures.

You may have met a lot of corporate development folks as part of the acquisition process. Now it’s time to meet the rest of them. Ensure they know to reach out if they need help on future acquisitions with vetting, sourcing, or whatnot. The same applies to any corporate venture investing team, often close to corporate development. Whatever your next company is, there is a high chance this same company will be a candidate investor or acquirer, and now is the best time to learn about their process and people from the inside.

Build relationships with industry analysts like Gartner.

As a smaller startup company, you have hardly any relationship with industry analysts like Gartner, who need compensation if you want their full attention. Now that you are at a large company, they pay Gartner and other firms. A whole department of Analyst Relations creates and maintains those relationships. If your acquisition was high-profile, you probably met them as part of a roadshow or announcement. But even if you didn’t, they will want to meet and introduce you to their favorite analysts. Industry analysts are like journalists, always looking for exciting things to write about. Your previous startup, and your perspective on the industry, are going to be compelling to them. Analysts are people, so when you get to know them, you can build relationships that will persist beyond your employment at this company. In your next startup, you will be better able to engage these firms early and get the proper attention.

Attend conferences and meet peers outside the company.

Now is the time to attend all those expensive junket conferences in Napa, Nantucket, and Boulder. Warm up your expense account, and learn what everyone else in the industry is working on. You will have a chance to meet your new peers at other large companies. Because you are from a startup background, they will be happy to talk to you about all sorts of things. You can gather precious insight into the rest of your industry from talking to peers, which should make you feel good about spending half the trip relaxing.

Work on something high-risk and high reward.

Whatever you do, being at a large company is a great time to try something high risk and high reward. Explore new ideas and new product lines. Work on things that could never work at a startup. You’ll probably fail, but failing with acquirer money is way more fun than failing with investor money. The company will benefit from you taking risks since they are already well hedged and honestly need more risk-taking; they don’t know how. If your project works, you will have no trouble recruiting people internally to take it over. And if it fails, you and the company will likely learn something valuable for the future.

Don’t leave before you leave.

As long as you work for the acquirer, keep engaging and doing things. Be selective in what you opt into, but don’t turn down projects because you might not be around to see them through. Circumstances change, and the project might be excellent. And if you start turning things down and doing as little as possible, that will make sticking around even more of a chore. Startup execs I see leave early do it because they get bored. So look at this list, and keep finding things worth doing with your time.

Conclusion

Getting your startup acquired is a significant milestone in your life. Take time to invest in yourself, and do plenty of things outside of work. As long as you are going to spend time with your new corporate overlords, make the best of it. I hope these ideas spur you to action. If you are someone who has been through this whole lifecycle, please leave comments about what worked for you.

Thanks for reading Richard’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.