ATTACH RATE

Bought, locked in for three years, gone in two.

An earnout is the clause that keeps founders at the company that bought them until the rest of their money vests. It is also, reliably, the window in which the thing they built stops getting better, because the people who cared about it are now counting down.

Earnout is about acquisitions that destroyed what they acquired. Yahoo bought Flickr, GeoCities, Delicious and Tumblr and buried all four. eBay paid $2.6 billion for Skype and sold it at a loss. HP wrote off $8.8 billion eleven months after buying Autonomy. Microsoft bought Nokia's phone business and closed it.

Each film follows the deal terms, the integration plan, and the month the original team stopped showing up. The price is usually the least interesting number in the story.

No hindsight investing advice and no villains. Buying a company is easy. Keeping the thing that made it worth buying is what almost nobody manages.

New film every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.