[Marina Barbir]

How do you find the right balance between keeping a small and innovative start-up / software independent enough to keep thriving while still lifting the synergies and reducing the overhead/operational cost by fully integrating them?

[Albert TAN]

perhaps you can start an employee share option scheme to encourage or incentiise them? or give share awards free to the talented ones?

[Gordon Foo]

Indeed, there is a delicate balance to achieve between giving the target’s management sufficient autonomy while pushing them to realize synergies (i.e. cutting cost) post the acquisition. One suggestion would be to put in place a proper management incentive plan for the key leadership of the target company (the startup in your case), which comes with both financial and operational goals in a 3-5 year horizon. At the same time, the acquirer company can demonstrate its support to strengthen the business of the target company by channeling resources and allowing the target to leverage its infrastructure to accelerate the progress (i.e. helping the management of the target company to achieve its goals so that they are entitled to the incentive payouts). This would help to align interest between the target company and the acquirer, while pushing the target’s management team sufficiently hard to perform the necessary ‘cost cutting’ to achieve the desired synergies.

[Andreas]

Bring people of the two companies together and see what will happen. Through Agile management you should be able to manage both independency and synergy.If it is a start up in software they should know agile management.

[Chong Jin Li]

I think it really depends on circumstance. My general reaction would be knowing which of the parts that need to be kept independent to preserve the innovation spirit and which are the parts that could be more integrated to derive synergies.

[Author]

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