A tasty rumor, if I ever saw one:
… little birdies have informed me that Yahoo has an offer on the table to buy Digg for somewhere in the range of $35 million dollars.
Being acquired by one of the big 3 is pretty much every web entrepreneur’s dream. Not only does it make you obscenely wealthy, but it validates your website’s mission as well (which may not seem quite as important, but I imagine it must feel great to be able to say "I told you this was a good idea" to all the naysayers).
Reading about this rumor reminded me of an interesting piece over at Signal Vs Noise about the dangers of building a company with an acquisition as its end goal:
If you’re about to build anything, don’t build it to flip or you’re almost guaranteed to flop. Sure, you could win the Yahoo lottery, but the odds aren’t in your favor. If 9 out of every 10 new companies fail, I can’t imagine the minute percentage of successful acquisitions. 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? Worse?
Although I totally agree with their philosophy of building a company with growth in mind, I do believe that the chances of a business’ success is a far more complex discussion than a mere statistical lottery. Like I said above, getting acquired by a multinational company is validation, in more ways than one. It means that your business had a solid idea, a great implementation and the potential to grow even further with the proper resources. Either that or they bought you out in an effort to kill the competition, but that in itself just confirms that you were on to something big.
So it’s not so much a "random act of fate" as it is "survival of the fittest," because it’s the people that have the great ideas and work the hardest to bring it to fruition that are ultimately rewarded for their efforts.