Api.ai is joining Google
api.ai
api.ai
So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
Yes, they're called "golden handcuffs". You basically get a compensation package so good that it'd be stupid to leave. Usually they try to get you to stay 3-5 but YMMV.
This was all independent of equity. Any vested equity was cashed out. Unvested equity converted to equivalent shares in the new company, with the same vesting schedule as before.
Of course that implies that the equity is worth anything. Most acquihires are at low multiples so the VCs tend to take the entire price, leaving founders and employees with nothing.
I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
The industry complains about being unable to find enough programming talent, while dismissing entire swathes of highly trained, highly educated people for investing in themselves.
OTOH, there could be something in culture and personality that pushes lesser devs into getting PhDs.
I'll go with a mage, thief, and warrior instead ;)
n=1
More info: he is a director for a well-used standard in the IETF, so he's no slouch.
amazing: they spend n million dollars just to get that talented individual, and then just throw it all away. My question is how is this expense reported/justified and who gets the difference? What about shareholder value?
Do they matter? It is just one of many metrics of how useful a repository is. I think it's one of the most public metrics that can be distilled to a single factoid on HN. There are absolutely better metrics to judge the quality of software.
https://github.com/thewhitetulip/web-dev-golang-anti-textboo...
Also I am not in US.
n = 1
When the company I worked for was acquired for team talent, they interviewed all but a handful of the engineers. Around half were given full time offers. Another group were given fixed-term offers and the remaining engineers didn't make it in.
I was given a fixed-term offer. Several months and many interviews later, I made it in as a full time employee. I was never outright rejected, but due to circumstances involving my contract and project work, I probably took around 9-12 Google interviews over that time.
They aren't fun. But in the end, I'd say it was worth it.
And yet you referred to it as "BS" and provided a sarcastic example in the same post. I'd say your attempt not to be negative and to sound serious failed.
And that wasn't sarcasm!
https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/
* Cloud Vision API - Upload an image, and it will tell you what is in it
* Cloud Speech API - Upload a wav and it will transcribe it
* Natural Language API - Parse sentences, extracts entities, sentiment and syntax
* Cloud Translate API - Translate from one language to another.
Api.ai would make a great bullet point to add to the end of that list!
One day Siri kept hearing that as "into hours" and I almost lost it.
Your comment is as toxic as the acquihire culture itself, and only makes users feel less "part of the internet" when companies treat them as disposable.
It's like the "assume your equity is worth zero" heuristic that many of us (including myself) employ when advising friends. It's not strictly accurate, and if taken truly literally it may poison the well for the startup ecosystem, but following this heuristic would prevent painful events for many employees.
Having been in numerous situations like this, I actually now "know better" than to rely on some 3rd party API that's not easily portable.
That's probably why most startups that provide infrastructure as a service are built on open source (using open standards) from day one. Otherwise good luck getting any traction
It's better for potential users to be aware of how often this happens, than go on in ignorance of it.
It doesn't have to be a startup. Google kills projects too.
They were bought by Gemstar-TV Guide, who moved the team to their office and then apparently forgot they'd bought the company. Our team pretty much had no duties other than showing up to "work". No one got shiny golden handcuffs, but they did get their salaries paid for a year. Eventually someone from HQ figured this out and everyone got the boot.
I was the lone holdout. Instead of moving with the team, I'd gotten a nice offer from Adobe and decided to run with it. The good news was that my job lasted for more than a year. The bad news was that I actually had to work.
Your soul dies just a little bit (or a lot) while watching the clock.
Or is every case handled differently?
I hate the definition of "acquihiring", which seems to have been written by a PR firm. It's made out to sound like an altruistic process that magically overrides the business's normal strategy where all that matters is the bottom line and bowing to investors / board members. The reality is that when acquihired, you've entered a new company with its own culture, underhanded and ruthless politics, and ulterior motives.
There is very little truly irreplaceable talent worth paying millions for. What an acquihire is really saying is "We need your help to transition this product into our company's structure. We can't do this in only 2 weeks, so we'll say now that you will be with us for years. Secretly we hope you leave shortly after the difficult transition is completed, but before we have to pay you".
If any business out there acquihires to the spirit of the definition, thanks for being of a rare species.
To put it another way: if you personally promised the engineer $5 million (vesting over 3 years) they may switch.
This means the buyer must see some value in the company over and above the engineers. (IP? Customers?)
Oh, and poaching has another risk - that you get only the worst employees.
Typically a "shotgun" clause is triggered and all employees immediately vest and cash out.
Founders, however, negotiate "earn out" clauses with the acquirer, which provides some upfront cash with the balance to be paid out over time, contingent on performance or retention goals.
I wouldn't assume that. Developer-friendly natural language APIs will only become more important over the next few years.
Edit: I should add Firebase could have(and should have) been the next PHP/Access. Could have solved almost every SMB business custom software need in a way that a business could go from front-end to front-end and never get locked into another 1,000 crud app for XYZ vertical. Could have wiped it all out. Firebase could have become the data store of the internet. Then Google showed up....
Given that Firebase seems to have become the foundation of Google's mobile app development offering I'm guessing ... pretty well?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
However, for some applications there's a vendor with a neural network (or whatever) trained on a billion inputs, you see it perform better than the open source equivalent trained on a million inputs, and you don't have a billion inputs to improve the open source version with.
It's just become cliché for companies to put up a page thanking customers (that are mostly likely getting screwed by the deal) for partaking in their incredible journey.
It's not so incredible when a service you were relying on stops providing that service.
Where does the belief in the tech come from? Are there any examples of real success with this tech?
Bots can't solve discovery in a novel way without big advances in NLP. There doesn't seem to be a bridge from here to there where it makes sense as a user.
Is this just irrational exuberance?
I'd love to understand why microsoft/google/facebook are all continuing to bet big here.
Because they can afford to. And because if you wait for success examples, you might just be too late.
That being said, I actually haven't seen a successful implementation of a full transition from a hybrid to a chatbot example (maybe like x.ai or something, but nothing on a large scale). Think there is really good opportunity there for some basic tasks, but still see bots as glorified menu options for the time being.
Having worked at 2 of the firms you listed above and doing some deep V1 bot explorations for one of them, the immediate idea for bots in the short-term is to replace apps (which is not the best UI interaction model for tail-end apps)
If so, I think Apple's approach in iMessage widgets is fantastic: If you send third-party content to a person that doesn't have the plugin installed, they'll also get a link to install it. So it boosts word-of-mouth.
My sense of discovery was meant in the UI sort of respect. When a feature is hidden from the user, that feature might as well not exist.
Bots (and command lines, for that matter) are awful unless you know exactly what they're capable of. There is an extrinsic knowledge you need.
That is, you can't expect a bot to know whatever you throw at it but you're unsure what you /can/ expect it to know.
The problem is that command lines are sort of made for the expert users whereas bots are said to be the opposite.
Whether that's a viable UX strategy is still up for debate.
In the meantime you're making a lot less than someone working at a large company. You could take the $50K/yr pay difference and buy lottery tickets with that.
I love when great companies do well.
I'm a happy customer (and wish I were also an investor, but I'm not).
What are your plans for transitioning off their service?
The script for this sort of acqui-hire is pretty well known at this point.
n dead = too many to count
Using the word "journey" is this context is rather... risky.
There's a podcast called "The Distance"[0] that investigates businesses that have been serving their customers for decades. Those stories are "incredible journeys". Two years of development and marketing ending in an aqui-hire isn't an incredible journey, and it certainly isn't a long journey.
Selling to Google is an accomplishment. It's an interesting accomplishment, but the rhetoric of journeys and battles is tedious. These people have an idea, implement and market it well, work hard, and achieve a solid exit.
They haven't changed the world, done anything particularly praiseworthy, or struggled very hard compared to the "journeys" of millions of other people. They built a business based on a promise to their users, and then more or less said: "screw you guys, we're off to Google now. Thanks for the journey." Pompous SV bullshit.