Sell your company, not your soul  February 5, 2013: 11:35 AM ET
The 'I-just-got-bought-by-a-big-company' survival guide --
straight from the front lines.  By Scott Weiss, contributor
scott-weissFORTUNE -- It took almost six months for my former
company IronPort's acquisition by Cisco to close and it seemed
like forever. Although I was still the CEO by name, I was
essentially running a "puppet" government with every hire, major
expense and strategic shift needing explicit approval from my
soon-to-be-overlords. Since Cisco was a functionally organized
company, I would soon be losing half of my direct reports as
sales, HR, and finance would report into their respective
groups. My job was becoming smaller and it had considerably
fewer degrees of freedom. So here was the big dilemma: I had
signed up for 24 months of re-vesting my founder's shares that
wouldn't begin until the deal was closed and it already seemed
like a paint-drying eternity. I was pretty sure that I wasn't
cut out for a big company but I just c