Making a statement like this is generally part of the terms of the acquisition.

Sure, but I imagine the terms of the acquisition doesn’t say you have to write it in this specific style.

I’m sure there’s a way to say the same thing without coming across as a bullshitter.

I just don't think there's much upside to telling it how it is in the press release that gets buried after a week and everyone moves on. For better or worse.

Why is telling it like it is not the rational default?

If this is a forgettable press release isn't it lower effort than coming up with this type of nonsense?

Maybe it’s just my age or how my brain works, but positivity with a touch of BS is just business-speak. My company sold itself to a crappy company who fired most of us, but my departure message for my colleagues was full of “I’ve enjoyed this journey, it’s been a privilege, blah blah” and not “I’ve actually been counting down the days to be done with this nonsense since even before the acquisition.”

You say this stuff because we all agree to sugar coat this type of thing. We all love money and most of us would sell a clearly-never-going-to-be-unicorn company we founded to just about any company if they offered a price that would make you or your whole team set for life. Like, I’d sell to Salesforce, or IBM, or Oracle, or Microsoft or Apple, or Monster Cable, or Ticketmaster. At least half of those, most of us would say are not innovative, and would ruin the product. But no one wants to work with or hire someone who comes right out and says “I hope we sell the company to some rich jerks (ANY rich jerks, really!) so I can retire to the Bahamas.”

> But no one wants to work with or hire someone who comes right out and says “I hope we sell the company to some rich jerks (ANY rich jerks, really!) so I can retire to the Bahamas.”

So just lie to them long enough to extract the value you need to sell out, right?

Thank you for the unabashed insight for the reader, but, as a founder: shame on that.

> we all agree to sugar coat this type of thing. We all love money

We don’t all agree. We don’t all “love money”.

We all don’t step on each other. That’s incorrect.

You’re justifying your choices,

which were made in the pursuit of presenting you in a particular way to others,

for your own psyche.

Agreed. It’s the good old “A little beating never hurt anyone. It certainly didn’t break me when my parents did it!” speech.

I would actually love to work for someone with that much honesty.

I will just go ahead and rewrite the post because it seems like my message isn’t landing. Maybe seeing what it could have looked like would be helpful:

Cirrus has been acquired by OpenAI with the goal of integrating our technology into their products. We will continue to serve existing customers until the expiration of their contracts, at which point Cirrus will cease operations as a separate entity. We are open sourcing our current products and hope they prove to be useful. Thank you to our customers and employees.

More like employees number 32,463 and 32,464 - they’re two people from what I seen on GitHub over the years. (Incredibly strong two people)

So they have even less of a reason to put out BS like this. They have no employees they need to talk to.

Could have been a private email to customers.