Sell Your Company, Keep Your Vision: How to Get Acquired Without Losing Your Core Values

Getting acquired is a goal many companies would be proud to accomplish, but is it possible to come out on the other side with your core values intact?

“One thing people don’t tell you when you start a business is how emotionally attached you become to it,” writes Amit Kulkarni, co-founder of Manymoon, now Do.com, in a guest article for VentureBeat. For Kulkarni, that was something that became strikingly clear to him and his colleagues at Manymoon once they were lucky enough to have their “baby” become the target of acquisition interest. So, as talks progressed, they had the foresight to prioritize a few things: first and foremost, they wanted to maintain their core values, and secondly, they wanted to keep as much autonomy as possible in order to follow through on their vision.

By prioritizing those goals, Manymoon was able to narrow the field of acquisition prospects to the companies who could provide them with the best chance of accomplishing them. That meant focusing on acquiring companies that shared the same values to begin with. For Manymoon, the best match was salesforce.com, which acquired the company in February 2011. “Once acquired, we relaunched Manymoon as Do.com,” Kulkarni writes, and “along the way we never lost sight of our values and culture.” How were they able to hold onto their vision? By making maintaining it a priority from the beginning.