A man in charge of small acquisitions at a large company told me once that’s the first thing he looks at - would that be cheaper to steal few key engineers, and will anything stand in the way? A small number of patents would usually dissuade him, iirc because fighting over the patents is more work than doing a proper small acquisition.
Yep small companies often under estimate the value of a couple of good patents.
Spending a few million to stand up a product w/o having a few patents that might cost $50,000 each to protect the company leaves them wide open for all kinds of bad.
