Dear Zoe, I’m deciding between a couple of AI startups right now, but the market feels incredibly acquisitive. Companies seem to be getting bought every few months by the big labs or tech giants. Should that change how I evaluate which company to join?
Yes, but probably not in the way you think. You're right that the pace is extraordinary. Over the past two years, the large technology platforms have been absorbing AI startups at speed.
OpenAI has made more than a dozen acquisitions since 2024, with six already this year; Google paid $2.4bn to acqui-hire Windsurf's leadership; and Workday paid $1.1bn for Stockholm-based Sana Labs.
Big Tech has spent tens of billions on acqui-hires in the past two years alone, with more large deals in discussion as we speak. We are even seeing startups turn to an acqui-hire strategy, to win top engineering talent in an unforgiving recruiting market. This is not a normal M&A environment, and it’s driven not just by eliminating competitors, but increasingly by the scarcity of talent and need for speed.
But it would be a mistake to treat acquisition probability as the primary lens. Most candidates I speak to want to build something lasting, and an acquisitive market feels like a threat to that. The framing misses the point. The right question is not "will this company get acquired?", it is "what will this experience make me capable of next, regardless of what happens to the company?"
Here is how I would think about it.
1/ Founder quality matters more, not less, in an acquisitive market.
The signal is not whether a founder is someone Google or OpenAI would want to acquire. It is whether they combine deep conviction with genuine founder-market fit and the resilience to keep building when the easier path would be to sell.
The best founders I meet believe normal outcomes do not apply to them. They are not optimising for optionality. They are pursuing a vision so ambitious that selling early would feel like a failure of nerve. Paradoxically, these are exactly the type of founders whose teams end up with the most options, because acquirers pay the highest premiums for people who do not want to be acquired.
Look for differentiated thinking, enormous ambition and a founder who talks about the future as though independence is the only path that makes sense for the mission. If acquisition happens anyway, it will happen on their terms.
2/ Bet on the room, not just the company.
In an acquisitive market, the team you join often matters more than the entity you join. The relationships you build with exceptional colleagues compound far beyond the lifespan of any single company. Your future cofounder, your next CTO hire, the person who opens the door to a game-changing opportunity, they are likely sitting in the room with you right now.
An acquisition is not the end of a story. It is one chapter in a longer career arc. When evaluating a startup, pay attention to how impressive the people you meet are. They should be extraordinary enough that you would want to build with them again. The ratio of exceptional people around you is always your best insurance policy in an uncertain environment.
3/ Evaluate what the company owns, not just what it builds.
Defensibility should be an evaluation lens. Does the company own the workflow or the outcome, not just a layer of the stack? Does it generate proprietary data and compounding learning loops as it operates?
My colleague Julien Bek makes the case: if a company sells a tool, every better model from a frontier lab thins the moat. If it sells the outcome, better models become cheaper inputs, not existential threats. A company that owns the outcome is one you can build a career inside. And there are more of these opportunities than the headlines suggest.
The foundation model companies are in a race towards AGI and have too much to focus on to care about every industry and workflow. That leaves enormous room for ambitious, focused teams to build something that lasts.
4/ Think about what the experience teaches you.
If you join a company that gets acquired in 18 months, you have not wasted time. You have lived through the full lifecycle of building an early-stage company: shipping when the product barely works, hiring when nobody has heard of you, scaling under real constraints and possibly navigating the complexity of a deal and post-deal environment.
It holds weight because it is proof you were in the room for the hard parts and built something valuable. The operators and founders who go on to do exceptional things are usually the ones who chose their experiences carefully. Choose the experience that compounds your ability to build something meaningful again later on, whether in the form of your own company or becoming the person every great founder wants on their team.
The acquisitive dynamics of the tech ecosystem are unlikely to slow down any time soon. But joining any early-stage company has always required high-optimism, and the best startup careers are not built by people who eliminate uncertainty. They are built by people who chose the right uncertainty and committed to it fully. Optimise for the career that compounds. Outcomes are uncertain, but what you learn and who you build with are not.
