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Comment by pvelagal | Hacker News Reader

May be google or any other company should treat these new initiatives as a separate startup company to begin with, with seed money as the input. Engineers hired should have salaries/options just like founders/co-founders. If the company achieves its objectives, Google or any other company should buy them back at a certain price or let the highest bidder buy (like uber or any other company).No body loses. Giving 100 million dollars upfront without any sense of ownership/accountability to drive a startup like effort, looks silly to me.

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Cisco did this with some success (by some measures at least!): http://www.businessinsider.com/why-cisco-showered-three-men-...

Basically, funded the company of their star engineer(s), and had a put/call (for Cisco and funded co) option based on certain milestones being met.

Deal summaries:

Andiamo (2001): cisco funded 180m, paid 750m to buy.

Nuova (2006): funded 70m, paid 678m.

Insieme (2012): funded 135m, paid 863m.

All founded by the same three engineers. This practice fell out of favor under chambers CEO-ship. Other employees (and execs, most importantly probably ha) didn't like for understandable reasons, but interesting to see similar dynamics play out here, with similar reactions.

I remember reading that this is a huge problem for companies in the "self-driving" space.

There's a lot of competition for this skillset, so you have to keep on giving more to the engineers... but then they have a bunch of money and they have less lock-in for the job. When you have $20 million in a bank account, why are you going to go make a powerpoint for your manager?

But if you give them "options" that might be worth nothing... well why not just go to Uber with their millions of Actual Real Cash(TM)? Or why accept "founder" salaries instead of real salaries?

Not that there's anything wrong with this, but the classic employer/employee relationship starts falling apart when the employees end up being this value.

Yeah Google has done this in the past. It's what they did with Google Wave. But Lazlo Bock has reflected that this caused the a lot of departures when the project failed. Not sure if they do that anymore.

They got the leading self driving car out of it. It's a lot to pay if it failed, it's a great investment of it suceeded

Leading a few years back.

We haven't heard anything else apart from a Waymo rebranding in multiple years.

My guess: The top people left, and the project lost momentum. I expect to see it grind on for a few years before being canned.

This seems like a troll, since in no way would this be true to anyone who is even remotely paid attention to the space.

There is some truth to this. People outside the Bay Area might not be aware of the slow and careful progress google has been making in creating a safe self-driving car. Compared to the Uber approach of just YOLOing the prototypes onto the streets of San Francisco it has gotten very little press.

That's essentially what incentive pay is: payments tied to achieving particular objectives.

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