Acquihire
noun, verb, slang ·Moderate ·College level
Definitions
- 1 An acquisition of a company to recruit its employees, rather than for its products or services. slang
"Then, in August, they bought Push Pop press, which was seen as an acquihire of designers Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas, who designed several of key pieces of the iPhone interface."
- 1 To acquire a company, in particular a small startup, to recruit its employees, rather than for its products or services. slang, transitive
"“Tarek was an acquihired founder like you. He turned out to be so awesome, I made him co-head of one of Phluttr's biggest projects! But that's rare. I usually look to guys like you and him to start something new. You're entrepreneurs, after all![…]”"
Example
More examples"“Tarek was an acquihired founder like you. He turned out to be so awesome, I made him co-head of one of Phluttr's biggest projects! But that's rare. I usually look to guys like you and him to start something new. You're entrepreneurs, after all![…]”"
Etymology
Coined by Rex Hammock in 2005 as acqhire, blend of acquire + hire, in reference to acquisition of Dodgeball.com by Google. Hammock subsequently worked to popularize the word. Spelling inconsistent, particularly to difficulty in pronunciation (/ak-hire/), leading to longer variants.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.