Employees of ZipDial were still celebrating Twitter ’s acquisition of the mobile services startup — its first in India — when the euphoria rapidly collapsed into shock and dismay. Nearly half of ZipDial’s about 50 employees had been laid off, serving a grim reminder to India’s startup ecosystem of the dark side of the acquisition dream.According to sources, at least 20 employees at ZipDial were handed pink slips a day after the acquisition in January. “Twitter does not have a role for us… There is nothing much we can do,” one of the laid-off employees said, adding that people from across project management, engineering, user interface, testing and marketing teams were asked to leave.Another person at Twitter who is familiar with the developments confirmed that at least 20 ZipDial employees were laid off after the acquisition, but declined to be identified. Several of the laid-off employees are actively seeking jobs on social networks.Former ZipDial chairman Sanjay Swamy estimated that only about 10 employees had been asked to leave, mainly from the testing, cloud telephony and marketing teams. “Twitter does not have a Quality Assurance or QA team. The engineers do their own testing. And some people on the cloud telephony side and sales side were taken off,” Swamy said.ZipDial’s former CEO Valerie Wagoner said “a majority of the ZipDial team” had joined Twitter. While headline-grabbing acquisitions serve as a validation for India’s rapidly growing startup community, much of what transpires as part of these deals is rarely spoken of. Mid-level and junior employees at the target startups often find themselves at the wrong end of the stick.“In an acquisition, the smaller guys will always be hit. They have to prove that they are masters of their patch of the jungle and that nobody can replace them,” said Guhesh Ramanathan, co-founder of Excubator.Sometimes, even the second-in-command at the target company is unaware of impending structural changes, said Ravi Gururaj, chairman of the Nasscom product council. “You don’t tell anybody anything before the acquisition. There is no obligation,” said Gururaj, adding he retained all 22 employees of his company VMLogix that he sold to Citrix.In a tech-led startup ecosystem as in India, there is little value for employees not enmeshed with the technology product. “The engineers are the most protected across all this,“ said Sanat Rao, mergers and acquisition adviser to software product thinktank iSpirt and who facilitated the TwitterZipDial deal. The number of layoffs at ZipDial was not significant, he added.The four-year-old startup built a thriving business around a uniquely Indian service, the "missed call". The feature is expected to help Twitter reach people who will come online for the first time in countries like Brazil, India and Indo nesia, mostly using a mobile device. “It looked like the acquisition was mostly for the 60 million user data and the core product,“ said another entrepreneur.This person said his company has received job enquiries from about 10 former ZipDial employees.“There is a standard protection clause for employees if they are dismissed arbitrarily,“ said Meghna Suryakumar, founder of Kelsaa, an international law practice that works closely with startups. "It would, in fact, be lucrative to the employees," she said.The laid-off employees at ZipDial were given a month's salary towards severance and will also receive the full value of the stock options they held, according to the former employee quoted above.