To put it neutrally, VC partners are treating these are parts of their same portfolios, so if one team doesn't pan out on its own, it can be merged into another with somewhat similar overall goals or markets.
To put it more pointedly, it's perhaps all about who one knows and making sure that everyone gets to tell a story of successful exits.
No. It's all about building a great product that people love. Vite is a foundational tool in the JS ecosystem.
Acquihiring the tool/team is entirely downstream from creating a foundational product.
There were several different hammers there, bearing different branding and having different manufacturers.
I don't quite get the distinction...
A foundational tool in an open ecosystem doesn't mean a monetisable product. I struggle to think of even a single example of a foundational tool with a business model.
And of course, not everything needs a business model. But if you're getting VC funding, you kind of need one.
Not necessarily: if the investors don't agree to a reasonable amount, the wanna-be acquirer will simply hire the entire team with generous sign-on bonuses, and the investors will be left with a shell of a company.
In this case, the core product is MIT-licensed, the team can quit on a Friday and pick up exactly where they left off under a new org on Monday.
The value to the investors also includes the outcome of dealflow resulting from the relationships and network built up along the way.
[0] https://voidzero.dev/posts/announcing-series-a [1] https://voidzero.dev/about
But it's also possible they haven't spent much of that money.
The investors don't need to be happy. They just need to be made whole (assuming they have a minority control).
It could literally be that only $2m ever got spent and that's been paid back.
It could also be that when literally nobody said they would pay for Vite+ the investors and team in general lost confidence and were actually very happy just to get their money back and pivot into this acquisition.
1. Product 2. Talent 3. Business/growth
In the AI era, some of acquisition happening in the space is for talent and product.
In this case, it looks like it was that. Vite is a great product they were able to build a great team.
You would be surprised how much of a premium companies can pay for talent.
Recent history shows that an idealized view only focusing on fiduciary duty does not capture the whole picture of business in the USA.
Indeed, so as a library/framework/engine/runtime user, for the last decade or so, I've basically avoided anything that touched VC-investments, as eventually the tool will either degrade, get too expensive or straight up disappear, and I got so tired of having to refactor and move stuff around just because new owner did something shitty.
It's more fun to just build the fun bits, get acquired, walk away with a lot of money, and start over again doing the fun bits (if you want to keep working).