In an aquihire, they typically ARE buying the product to get the talent capable of building the product in question.
Let's say you've built some product capable of receiving millions of http connections a minute from thousands of servers and then distributing those to thousands of servers as they request a new batch. But you can't find a market. However this is (was of course) a real-world problem for Twitter.
Suddenly you are a really attractive aquihire. Maybe they'll use your tech, but more likely they value your problem solving experience in their specific problem domain.
Let's say you've built some product capable of receiving millions of http connections a minute from thousands of servers and then distributing those to thousands of servers as they request a new batch. But you can't find a market. However this is (was of course) a real-world problem for Twitter.
Suddenly you are a really attractive aquihire. Maybe they'll use your tech, but more likely they value your problem solving experience in their specific problem domain.