Note: I wasn't a founder, but one of the two first employees and a minor shareholder. Internally, we called ourselves as a founding team as when we joined, things really started to happen. Founders weren't devs themselves.
Given that we had worked on Jaiku just a bit over a year before the acquisition, getting acquired by Google was a very pleasant surprise.
We were a talent acquisition like the most Google acquisitions are. Acquired communities are rather tiny for Google and if there is important server-side technology it usually has to be rewritten anyway for Google infra.
The toughest part was that we had to let go of the Jaiku service and eventually the community as we couldn't develop Jaiku full-time anymore.
Although we were behind e.g. Twitter (we started before them) and Facebook (we had the stream of posts before them) in users, our core users really really loved Jaiku. It was the first web page they visited every day and many still think that Jaiku's model was superior to both Twitter and Facebook.
This is the key: in talent acquisitions, it's probably best idea to communicate that the service will be shut down eventually. This way the community doesn't have false hopes. If it turns out that you can continue to put enough effort to existing service, the old community will likely come back.
Feel free to ask more. I can try to write a few key points to remember when you get acquired by a large tech company, but I need to code a bit first ;-)
At jaiku I'm sure you had a lot of input in the direction of the product and control over the technology. Moving into google I assume you had to give up a lot of that. Was it worth it? Is there anything you miss from the jaiku days?
As a founder it makes a ton of sense to sell early. Cashing out for $2M (or whatever) for 18 months work is hard to say no to. For an employee with <5% equity though it can't be all that great. If the decision was yours alone and you were acting in a purely financially self-interested way what would you have done?
For an employee with <5% equity though it can't be all that great
But since this thread is about acquisition by Google, don't forget that many of those employees that drew <5% now work for Google. Some continued working on the acquired product, and some might be reassigned to an existing or new project. It seems to me that isn't a particularly bad situation for an equity employee.
What do you want to know? Of course, I can't go to details of the acquisition or work we did inside Google.