Tiny vs. Strategic Acquirers.

Because the Salesforce number is rarely what it looks like. Stock is often a meaningful portion of the consideration, retention packages and earn-outs defer real cash, and the product the buyer is paying for usually does not survive integration. Tiny usually offers a simpler, cash-heavy outcome and leaves the company operating. The right comparison is net cash plus what happens after — not gross headline.

It happens often, and it is rarely malicious. The acquirer's priority is their own roadmap; your product becomes a feature, then a SKU, then end-of-life. Microsoft + Mixer, Google + Reader, Cisco + Flip — the same story repeats. If product continuity matters to you, a strategic sale without an enforceable preservation commitment is a bet against history.

Cash is certain; acquirer stock is a bet on the acquirer. Stock-for-stock can be tax-efficient and can deliver enormous upside if the buyer keeps compounding. It also crashed real consideration for plenty of founders who sold near a peak. If you do take stock, model the deal at the buyer's 12-month low, not its current price. Diversifying out promptly is usually the right move.

Run the process. Multiple bidders is leverage and the only way to know what the market thinks the asset is worth. Tiny is comfortable in a process, and we will tell you quickly whether we are competitive or not. The honest read is that strategics often win on gross headline; Tiny wins on certainty, structure, and what the company looks like the day after close.

You can try. Some acquirers will agree to a multi-year brand preservation clause, an independent operating mandate, or a separately-run business unit. Enforcement is the hard part: management at the acquirer turns over, priorities shift, and the contract does not stop a product from being deprioritized into irrelevance. Read the cautionary tales before believing the promises.

Earn-outs tie a portion of the purchase price to post-close performance — revenue, retention, or product milestones — over 1-3 years. The mechanics often favor the buyer: they control the operating environment, the cost base, and the metrics. Founders frequently miss earn-outs they would have hit running the business independently. Negotiate hard or discount the earn-out heavily when comparing offers.

Strategic diligence is the heaviest of the three. Corporate development, legal, tax, integration, IP, security, and HR run in parallel and can take 90-180 days. Tiny's diligence is typically two to four weeks with a small team of principals. Different process, different drag on the founder's time, different probability the deal closes on the terms originally proposed.

Strategics often pay generously to retain key engineers and PMs: double-trigger acceleration, retention bonuses with 2-4 year vesting, and competitive comp bands. The catch is most of that value is contingent on staying inside a much larger company through integration — which is precisely when most acquired talent leaves. Read the retention agreements as carefully as the purchase agreement.

Strategics will scrub IP provenance harder than any other buyer. Inventor assignment, open-source license compliance, contractor IP transfer, patent freedom-to-operate — all of it gets diligenced. If your codebase has any IP hygiene gaps from the early days, surface them early. A strategic will find them, and they are the most common cause of late-stage retrades or deal collapse.

Almost always. A real conversation with Tiny costs you one phone call and gives you a credible alternative to anchor the strategic process against. It also gives you a fallback if the strategic deal collapses in diligence — which a non-trivial percentage do. Email hello@tiny.com. First conversation is one founder talking to another, with no bank or committee involved.