You won't get anywhere if it's clear that getting bought is your end goal. The acquisition, to a buyer, is a beginning rather than an end for them, and an entrepreneur who clearly just wants to cash out is going to be very unappealing to them. What you need to project to potential buyers -- and to everyone, frankly, because everyone might *know* a potential buyer or provide a testimonial or reference for you -- is your team's raw talent and ability to be part of a productive team.

Reputation is really everything in the acqui-hire space. No company will make a talent acquisition unless it really, really knows and understands the talent. I believe many of Twitter's acqui-hires have been of start-ups that were already vendors or contractors at Twitter, and quite a few of Facebook's acqui-hires were start-ups founded by people who had known the Facebook founding team for years.

I would highly recommend Exitround to any founder who isn't tapped into the kind of network that easily leads to a talent acquisition by Google or Facebook. I recommend this in part because the founding team is prioritizing the ability for founders and potential buyers to connect across industries. Their system, though very new, aims to ultimately create ways to make introductions and facilitate deals between companies that would probably never meet one another otherwise -- something that's increasingly appealing seeing that there are many large non-tech companies that may see acqui-hiring as the best way to build out a new digital product division.