Facebook Acquisition Recovery

A story about how Shaan Puri almost sabotaged his company's acquisition by using the wrong terminology, but managed to recover.

"When we were selling our company, I made a mistake during outreach. I reached out to Facebook through somebody I knew, and I used the word 'acquihire' which was the wrong word to say. Acquihire means a specific range of what outcome you're going to get - it basically means don't value my company, just value my talent.

I shouldn't have done that, but I was luckily able to recover because it was such a big company. By the time the introduction went through multiple people, I had completely changed the narrative. The third person was like 'yeah, you guys looking at acquihire?' and I said 'I don't know where you got that' - even though I literally had sent an email saying that myself.

I managed to change the narrative, and Facebook actually ended up coming in with the highest offer. It could have been critically bad, but we recovered from that mistake."