When a software company is acquired, the retention package is often built around one or two named people

• Those names come from management interviews and the seller's own account of who matters. The person who can explain the system is not always the person it depends on.
• Whoever merges and reviews changes to the parts that matter can be a contractor, someone you never met, or someone who left a year ago.
• The development record shows who wrote each change, who approved it and what moved with it. A wrong name is paid for twice, in retention and in relearning what they knew.

• #due-diligence
• #key-person
• #m-and-a
• #retention