Hi,

I know you lot are an industrious bunch and I am sure more than a few are exciting startups with the hopes of selling up one day.

What I'm wondering is, does anyone have any experience or knowledge of any standard in regard to documentation of procedures and or code that bigger companies would insist on before considering making an offer? By that I mean is there a best practice, compliance or standard that exists?

A very strange question, I know, but I'm fairly confident that someone in the Linode community has experience of it I'd be grateful for any thought you might have.

Thanks,

TT

Y Combinator would be one of the best places to learn about those things. Even if you can't attend one of their events, there's always Hacker News which is an incredibly rich source of startup-related information.

I work with startups, founded startups, sold startups to bigger companies.

The simple answer is no. And you shouldn't really build or operate your startup from the perspective of doing something to help get acquired.

Running an enterprise-level codebase, for example, would have a negative impact upon your ability to be a nimble startup today.

Also you risk loosing the very efficiencies of a startup that are what allows such a small entity to be come successful. Conversely if you start thinking what a big company would want to see you might never get to the point where you are in a position to be acquired.

I've been involved with a startup that had a horrible .net codebase that was acquired by an all-java enterprise. They ultimately bought the company for the product and the users and with their resources it was easy to re architect the code into Java that used their existing frameworks, business logic, etc.