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Comment by pb | Hacker News Reader

The right person is. How much was Steve Jobs worth to Apple?

Bret is one of the most outrageously talented and productive people I've ever worked with. In a high-leverage position, such a person can be extremely valuable.

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That's a good question. When Steve came back to Apple through the NeXT acquisition, he didn't come alone. He brought a team of smart devs, and a pretty awesome technology stack (Foundation, AppKit, Objective C).

Now Steve was obviously the lynchpin and you probably couldn't have gotten one without the other, but I wonder hypothetically what the value of those things separated would have been. Steve alone, or team+ip alone. I suspect neither one would have been as valuable as both together.

In hindsight Steve Jobs was worth billions but that was not clear at all at the time he was (re-)hired. Many super bright and previously successful people have failed in their new positions. When you price that risk in, $750M hardly seem like a great deal.

What size company is Quip? What size company is Salesforce? It doesn't matter how productive you are, how smart you are, or how "anything" you are. You can't beat the bell curve. What matters in the grand scheme of things is how good everyone else around you is. I've never seen smart/productive people last at large companies. The bozo/non-bozo ratio is always too high at big companies.

Yeah. Large companies are lead by idiots. That's why they are so large.

No, they got large because they weren't previously lead by idiots. Then they get large and then they rot.

History is littered with endless examples: HP, IBM, GM, Kodak, Sony, Xerox, Sears, Pan Am, US Steel, Nokia.

Some of them collapsed entirely, some still struggle on, some recovered only to rot again. It's rare that mega corps don't go through some variation of a rot cycle due to the accumulation of poor leaders at the top once they get large enough and far enough away from the original vision and leadership that got them to the top.

You are oversimplifying this to the point where your conclusion is almost completely wrong. There are many factors which contribute to the decline of companies. For example there was an article about Kodak on HN and why it failed. The inertia was too strong in that case. Differences in goals and objectives is another very popular reason.

I understand it's tempting to think your bosses are morons but they rarely are.

So if Kodak leadership was full of geniuses how come it failed? Companies often get large not because of leadership but because they happen to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea. Plenty of people have the right idea but they rarely happen to be at the right place and time.

I pointed you out (sort of) to why Kodak failed. It had MASSIVE facilities with 10s of thousands of employees making industrial chemicals. You cannot snap your fingers and transition to another business model.

Indeed. Why do you think a giant software company is any different? Having incompetent leadership just exasperates the problem. Your assumption was intelligence of leadership somehow mattered and I pointed out you are incorrect. Leadership intelligence doesn't matter as much as people think.

- Leadership at large companies are not morons.

- Why Kodak failed then?

- Kodak failed because of inertia.

- Leadership intelligence doesn't matter.

Do you hear that? That's the sound of the logic chain breaking.

Don't hear it. All I hear is someone that thinks leadership at large companies can make a difference. Oh wait, I did hear a logic chain breaking there. The break was caused by some kind of pre-conceived notions about leaders making a difference.

Can't help you if logic falls on deaf ears.

Why not just hire him directly? Hey, come work for us. Here, salary of $20/mil a year, guaranteed for the next 5 years.

Theoretically, as the CEO of Quip, he has some interest in helping his coworkers cash out too.

Obviously the rest of the team is likely to be very talented as well. Also, he's the founder, which includes a responsibility to act in the best interest of the company (plus $20M/yr would be much less money).

Also, someone like Bret is very unlikely to be attracted by purely monetary gain like a $20/mil year salary(or even $50/mil year.) He probably cares as much, if not more, in being able to achieve some larger goal--which requires building a sort of team he has already built.

Nothing like abandoning a company you built right as it hits its stride.

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