Can I clarify something? Google actually is acquiring Windsurf. But the new mechanism to do this which doesn’t run into bogus “antitrust” objections is to buy the assets rather than the company. Like all these other deals. Investors still get paid and employees still get an exit.

For years, tech has been dealing with the incorrect and also malicious argument that “it hurts startups when big companies acquire them.” It’s incorrect because when a big company acquires a startup, it’s often more a surrender than a conquest. It signals that the bigco could not build, so it had to buy. And then the money for that acquisition funds 1000 more startup piranhas. It’s malicious because it comes from the anti-tech school of thought that hates capitalism, voluntary transactions, and the like. Obviously any regulation pushed by Elizabeth Warren or the Lina Khan-era FTC isn’t going to help technology advance, it’s only going to advance state power. A great example of this is when the Figma acquisition by Adobe was blocked in the 2020-2024 window. Figma managed to rally and IPO, because @zoink is a stud, but many lesser companies would have died after the distraction of having their big acquisition blocked. Over the long run, the entire idea of giving a non-technical (and increasingly hostile) group of state bureaucrats veto power over voluntary transactions will eventually go the way of the dodo once we have the entire economy onchain. But right now we are still in a transitional state where Delaware is obviously wrong, and stablecoins are fully legal, but entirely onchain incorporation and accounting is not yet fully there. Once it does get there, the Internet takes over as the regulator of global capital markets. Then, when two actors want to engage in a voluntary transaction, a third party can’t stop them unless the two are on a chain (or contract) that explicitly permits that.

In short: we solve the problem of acquisitions stuck in regulatory limbo by playing the game of regulatory limbo.