[Taylorious]

I don't think it's fair to blame the megacorps and not the companies that are selling out. All these startups talk a good game about being cutting edge, disruptive, a passionate place to work etc. but it's all BS. Engineers work their asses off working on something they believe in and the minute some megacorp waves a big check in front of the founders they sell out. They might be passionate about their product but they are still more passionate about giant piles of money.

It's stuff like this that makes me not want to work for a startup. These guys had a great business. Everyone loved their product. Even the people who got physically sick from using it still thought it was cool and wanted them to succeed. They had a perfectly viable company that could have been very profitable on its own. But hey who wants all the responsibility and work of having your own profitable company when you can just sell out...

Let's not even get into how unethical it is to use something like KickStarter to get you started and then turn around and sell out for billions a couple years later before you even ship a consumer product.

[Mz]

My comment elsewhere in this discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7469426

Not justifying it. Just saying if you are David, Goliath can be awfully hard to stand up to, psychologically, especially if Goliath is offering you money rather than looking to kill you (even though, long term, the result may be the death of your company).