<story><title>Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B</title><url>https://www.investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>This kinda feels like one of those acquisitions where all the special sauce that makes the acquired company a great company is the exact opposite in the acquiring company.&lt;p&gt;That is, from all I&amp;#x27;ve heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the &amp;quot;scrappyness&amp;quot; that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too.&lt;p&gt;Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for &amp;quot;regulatory capture&amp;quot; company. Also, since employees don&amp;#x27;t have equity (though I&amp;#x27;m assuming they&amp;#x27;ll get fat bonuses for this), it&amp;#x27;s bound to cause some level of strife in the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>contravariant</author><text>For anyone who (like me) didn&amp;#x27;t know the first thing about intuit, I looked them up on Wikipedia. Some highlights:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Intuit offers a free online service called TurboTax Free File as well as a similarly named service called TurboTax Free Edition which is not free for most users&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, has lobbied extensively against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) creating its own online system of tax filing&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; [I]nvestigations by ProPublica found that Intuit deliberately steered taxpayers from the free TurboTax Free File to the paid TurboTax Free Edition using tactics including search engine delisting and a deceptive discount targeted to members of the military.&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intuit&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Intuit&lt;/a&gt;
[2]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;TurboTax&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;TurboTax&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>Intuit to Acquire Mailchimp for $12B</title><url>https://www.investors.intuit.com/news/news-details/2021/Intuit-to-Acquire-Mailchimp/default.aspx</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>hn_throwaway_99</author><text>This kinda feels like one of those acquisitions where all the special sauce that makes the acquired company a great company is the exact opposite in the acquiring company.&lt;p&gt;That is, from all I&amp;#x27;ve heard, Mailchimp is a great company to work at, and the founders definitely had the &amp;quot;scrappyness&amp;quot; that let them become so successful without VC funding, and their customers really like them too.&lt;p&gt;Intuit, on the other hand, is basically the poster child for &amp;quot;regulatory capture&amp;quot; company. Also, since employees don&amp;#x27;t have equity (though I&amp;#x27;m assuming they&amp;#x27;ll get fat bonuses for this), it&amp;#x27;s bound to cause some level of strife in the company.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>curun1r</author><text>Having worked at a company that was acquired by Intuit, they gave fairly substantial retention bonuses that vested over the 3 years following the acquisition that ended up being about 4x the value of my original pre-acquisition stock options, though the retention bonuses varied greatly and not everyone got that much. So I’d expect that Intuit is taking care of the employees that are considered key to Mailchimp’s business.</text></comment>