How I Almost Got Acquired By Apple And Then Snubbed
kandarpmadhav.wordpress.com
kandarpmadhav.wordpress.com
You may have put a lot of hope in the "if you've already incorporated, we could acquire your company" line but I can guarantee they didn't put a lot of thought into it.
They were just talking about hiring you (with "acquisition" as the legal mechanism, or not). Maybe with a bit of a hiring bonus.
The standard play when dealing with any large company is always "hurry up and wait". For whatever reason, this is just something you need to get used to.
Do you really expect either Steve or this engineering manager to be replying within 48 hours? I think the second you started badgering them and brought Steve back in the loop, you were toast.
The experience I've had with dealing with big corps is very much "hurry up and wait". Often this is a symptom of the structure and politics of bigger institutions, where you don't have to convince just the person you are dealing with but convince them to convince others. If they decide to try to bring you in it is their reputation on the line, a reputation that could be damaged even if the deal never goes anywhere.
I've been caught in the middle of some nasty office politics that have totally killed negotiations because I had the wrong guy championing my cause.
Oh and does it strike anyone else as a bit unprofessional to go posting correspondence to the world? I'd certainly think twice before dealing with anyone who had done this in the past, talk about burning bridges! Or am I alone in expecting a certain measure of privacy in my business comms?
I agree he was a bit unprofessional. Gates' awareness probably did fall off as his earlier emails were buried under the mountain of new stuff. Rather than shouting "Hey look at me" he should have sent a gentle reminder about improvements that have been made in the last week or whatever. Bring him back to top of mind in a positive way. Who wants to get stuck working with a guy that annoying.
Copying Jobs as if he were an active part of the project is a total dick move, BTW. He should be thankful that Steve routed him to the right person. The only future communication to Jobs should have just been a quick thank you for the introduction.
My sense is that in practice the ethics of responding to email have simply loosened. It's no longer considered rude to leave email unresponded. It's just a fact of life.
I interviewed at one company that said they'd be making a decision by the end of the week (it was Monday), and would let me know either way. The following Tuesday I sent an e-mail asking if they'd made their decision. A week later, I got an e-mail saying they'd 'gone in a different direction'.
Another company I interviewed with, which involved going to their tiny office miles from anywhere in the rain, talked to me for an hour about not really a whole lot, then said they'd let me know by the end of the week. I didn't care, since I didn't want to work with them, but I was very surprised when I got an e-mail a month and a bit later saying they weren't interested.
There are always exceptions though. After I left my second-to-last job, I decided to take a month off. My last day was October 31st, and I relaxed, cleaned the house, and played video games for most of November. When I woke up on the morning of December 1st, I had an e-mail on my phone from LinkedIn about a friend request from the founder of a server hosting company we'd worked with. I e-mailed him back and asked if he was hiring. Met him at 4 PM, and got the 'welcome aboard!' e-mail at 6:15.
It really comes down to culture. Some people have the attitude of 'I'll do it later', even for things that will only take a few minutes, and some people are go-getters who are eager to get things done and off their plates, and make some progress in the meantime.
My favourite though was when, in September 2008, I signed up to be put on a waiting list for a job at the 911 dispatch for the area (since they had just filled up their quota the week before). 18 months later, I got a phone call asking me to call them back as soon as possible (the tone in the person's voice implied 'today or early tomorrow') so we could schedule a time. The call went to voicemail, and I got something to laugh at when I got out of the movie.
Not really an exception if it wasn't a rejection. Once a company decides to bring you aboard it's in their interest to make haste.
It is unethical in all cultures to keep someone waiting while you flout the time commitments.
One thing that I noticed: he never told them where he got his feed data from. I would have taken that as stonewalling from him.
It wouldn't be unreasonable for the engineering manager to get back to him within a few says. There are plenty of slow coasters and non-communicators in large organizations. Most people who are competent accept the beuracracy then find ways of routing around them to get things done. The good companies avoid hiring them in the first place.
It would have taken very little to:
* Real email sent specifically to them. I get a thousand plus emails a day and read every one of these within about 3 hours. My colleagues get way more but still do the same.
* Respond with 'completely snowed under, sorry, want to give this a few hours to look at properly' back to the poster.
That said, I don't think sending email to Steve was a good idea. Call or fax or whatever - if he's out, ask for an offsider to talk to. But bothering the CEO is inappropriate.
Most likely they looked at what he was outputting and weren't impressed, or had another solution in mind. I'm assuming (and hoping for his sake) from my interpretation that he never submitted actual code to them - just output.
Who knows.
I will say that it was handled very poorly. At the point they weren't interested they should have said it rather than just not responding to email.
But to continue to pester the engineer and worse, Steve... What kind of response do you expect?
Further, does he think the software engineer has nothing to do but work on this project with him?
No, but when he explicitly promises something, and then doesn't deliver, it's more than fair for him to e-mail until that demand is met.
I personally use the two week rule. If someone says they'll get back to me in a few days I give them a couple weeks before I e-mail a reminder. If they don't respond I wait another week and if I still get nothing I give up.
This guy comes across as self important and nothing turns other people off more than that.
Oh, right. I forgot that in the business world, words suddenly don't have any fucking meaning whatsoever. You can bet your ass that if a corporation wanted something from you (i.e., payment) in a few days, they wouldn't leisurely wait a few weeks before e-mailing you.
There seems to be this unspoken rule in the Apple world that if you happen to get an e-mail from Steve Jobs, even if he threatens to dig up your dead mother and defile her corpse, you'd better drop down on your knees and thank him for even speaking to you.
Fuck that.
Getting a payment from someone is very different to trying to get something for free from a company, or trying to get acquired.
I don't understand why everybody is emailing Steve Jobs all of a sudden, and I certainly wouldn't just start sending email to CEOs of companies.
No, I'm not.
Getting a payment from someone is very different to trying to get something for free from a company, or trying to get acquired.
You promise the company payment. The guy in the e-mail was promised continued discussion at a specific point in time. The point I'm making is that if you shortchange a company, they have more power to punish you than if they shortchange you. Thus, I don't understand this casual attitude with companies, where if you don't get a response you just "give up".
I don't understand why everybody is emailing Steve Jobs all of a sudden, and I certainly wouldn't just start sending email to CEOs of companies.
What's wrong with sending an e-mail to a CEO? I genuinely don't understand this. We saw the same thing with that prick from AT&T. Why is it so taboo to jerk the chain of the person in charge? Is their time just so valuable that they shouldn't even have to bother with the lowly proles?
In general, it's not a good way to get this guy to give you a green light on getting hired/acquired.
1. Steve -> Engineer: Whats with the delay?
At this point, almost nothing the engineer could say shows him in a good light - "sick" doesn't cut it at the power difference here. You only talk to the CEO once in a decade, and his experience of you is "doesn't deliver"?
2. Engineer -> Steve: I evaluated it. It sucks. I haven't written back yet as it's not a high priority.
3. Email from Steve -> Unfortunate dude: No interest.
1. Steve -> Manager: This guy e-mailed me again, does this need to be dealt with?
2. Manager -> Steve: It's a good algorithm, but the guy's been demanding and impatient, and with everyone prepping iOS/iPhone 4 for WWDC, Engineer just hasn't had time to look into it.
3. Steve -> Dude: No interest.
Specifically, I highly doubt that Steve Jobs would speak directly with an engineer about a potential acquisition of a potentially useful algorithm. I doubt it was ever really on his radar at all after the first 30 seconds where he read it and forwarded it off. That's the entire reason managers exist.
If anything, I got the impression that the Apple Manager was stalling (or maybe he really was ill and it really took him 10 days - from May 4 to May 14 - to "get back on his feet")
Or else he's just a busy guy with a lot on his plate apart from this one project which he's not that interested in with some guy who keeps pestering him.
Also, if the manager was considering hiring this guy, he was probably looking not just at his code, but evaluating what kind of a person he is and culture fit. If they're hustling to get ready for WWDC while this guy keeps emailing and pointing out what competitors like Google are doing (as if they don't know this), he may have concluded that this is someone he just doesn't want to work with, regardless of the guy's algorithm.
If this was just trying to harden him up for what it's really like to work inside of Apple, it's a wonder they get anything done at all.
The talk of acquisition happened really early in the conversation - it was all theoretical at that point. They dug a little deeper, and for whatever reason they decided that while they could acquire his working demo, they chose not to on this occasion.
And then you actually try to get it done and you get stalled. But you may not have a "No" yet from above so you stall. It's a reasonable thing, but it seems like this guy was pegging all his hopes and dreams on this, and got over-excited.
When I interview people we bandy about a lot of "ifs". But if the interviews don't go well, or if they submit crappy sample code, things tend to peter out from there.
The "if" in this question which is clearly missing but implied (at least in dealing with American companies) is "If there's something of value here, and the two parties are a good fit, and we think we can make this work...". There was no verbal contract here, or even an offer to acquire. It was a job interview, and he didn't get the job.
> It was a job interview, and he didn't get the job.
They then did the equivalent of:
Thanks for your time, we'll get back to you
It just took them awhile to make a decision.
Also - I don't think anyone had necessarily decided "No" until he gave Steve an ultimatum. Steve seems to be a pretty stochastic guy - in this case he took it as "Fine, then fuck off".
If you've managed to get hiring decisions right there in the interview good for you - usually you have to wait a bit for them to decide ;)
> If you've managed to get hiring decisions right there in
> the interview good for you - usually you have to wait a
> bit for them to decide ;)
Or if you want to take the analogy to "waiting for a reply after the interview," then this is more like Apple stalling on making a decision on hiring him. They've interviewed him, and he pings them every week, but a couple of months later they still claim to have made no decision while continuously claiming that a decision is right around the corner and/or just needs one more person's approval/review.
At first, you be persistent, and you get more dates and more contracts because of it. But you also learn when to take a hint, and Apple gave you several.
I don't understand why this thread seems to be going out of their way to shit on this guy. It's not like Apple said "eh" and didn't respond, they kept saying they'd get back to him and never bothered.
It's called leading someone on, it's rude, and I'm startled at the number of excuses that are being made for this guy.
Wait, what? This is the classic way by which someone expresses that they are not interested without saying so directly. Don't call us; we'll call you.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/may/08/change-li...
It's really cool that HN is going the reddit route of downmodding comments that they disagree with. Although I don't even think my comments would have been downmodded over there. Because we're all hip and "hackers" at HN we just tolerate and expect people to be shitty to each other in the business world. Real cool guys.
The only emotion I injected was "I am startled". Yeah, really `acid in temper or mood`. Especially when * ironically* I was addressing the acerbic comments being pointed at the author for ACTUALLY BELIEVING people when they told him they were interested.
Is it opposite day on HN or did I miss a memo?
"shitty" "can't believe" "pathetic"
Strong words. HN will generally downvote strong displays of negative emotions, especially if it's something purely subjective.
It was also slightly accusatory, saying other HN users were "making excuses" for this behavior. There's some ambiguity as to whether you meant the behavior itself was pathetic or the people "making excuses" were pathetic. I think you meant the latter.
Maybe this is an easier way to understand it: imagine you're in a room filled with people talking about this issue, and you stood up and said what you said out loud. How do you expect people to react? Positively?
I can't believe I'm explaining this in such detail. Haha.
I can't believe I'm explaining this in such deal. I meant the usage quite literally. I'm shocked that an intelligent community such as HN is excusing the behavior because it's supposedly "normal". I think the treatment and thus the excuses are "shitty" which doesn't have a formal definition for me to rattle off, but suffice it to say I think it covers "unacceptable behavior" which is a category that lying and leading people on generally falls into.
Perhaps your comment is getting downvoted because your premise seems incorrect? When I first saw your reply, I thought, "Hey! That's not fair! Just because I explained what people do doesn't mean that I excused what they do." I was being descriptive, not prescriptive. In other words, I thought your reply was pretty unfair, but I was not going to reply because I felt like it was just splitting hairs.
Now that you're getting downvoted and have replied a second time, I just thought I'd point out that others may have felt the same way about your comment as I did. Indeed, the very same people who are downvoting your comment very well may not agree with the behavior that my comment described as being typical.
I don't buy your explanation. I'd like to, but all over this thread there are highly upvoted comments that explain that this guy was out of lining by expecting anything at all, even though Apple continually led him on. They could have sent two teeny-tiny bytes 'N' 'o' and been done. But instead they were dicks.
I don't really see why my reply was unfair. If you weren't making excuses for apple, fine, but there were dozens of posters on this topic that are/were.
On the other hand if the Apple engineer were the one writing the blog post everybody would jump on what he did that was wrong.
Dare I suggest you might be upset at an analogous situation in your own life?
As for the woman, the odds are not looking good in such a situation.
My comment just above and the comment comparing reddit to HN, I fully expected to get downmodded. The other comments were simply chastising HN's mockery of the guy that actually believed what the Apple engineer said and IMO do not deserve to be downmodded.
No.
Whoever writes Roissy in DC: http://roissy.wordpress.com/ is an asshole but also hilarious. It might be worth reading.
In addition, the reason people are ragging on this guy is because a) the behavior is typical and b) not surprising from the POV of Apple. In addition, the guy is making the mistake PG writes about in Two Kinds of Judgment: http://paulgraham.com/judgement.html .
Of course it would be nice if people would just tell you when they're not interested, but generally nobody does that. Adjust your filters accordingly - if someone doesn't seem excited, they're probably not interested at all.
Maybe it happens, but this has not been my experience, or the experience of several of my friends who have had their startups acquired.
So basically to get acquired, you need to look like you're not going to embarrass the person doing the acquiring. The best way to do this is to have a longterm relationship with that person and their colleagues. This makes you feel like much more of a known entity in the eyes of the acquirer. Because at the end of the day, regardless of what the book say you never really know what you're getting when you buy a company. Everything piece of the company could be independently audited, but that's not going to stop a critical 5M dollar machine from breaking in half the day after you buy the business.
Anyway I'm not an expert, this is just what I've heard from other people who have been acquired.
I wish (speaking from my own experience). It may be true for very large companies acquiring really small ones, but there is an entire world out there of acquisitions of small players by slightly larger companies. Neither the 500K salary nor the small bonus apply. Such acquisitions almost look like mergers: they can make or kill the entire company. We are not talking about a small bonus here, it's the livehood of the entire startup. It matters a lot.
The manager said he was sick on May 4. On May 14 he said he was caught up and would get back next Monday (which is May 17). There was another nudge on Wednesday, May 19. Almost a week after that, on May 25, Steve gets CCed again.
While I grant that 3 days out due to sickness excuses some tardiness, the manager was given lots of time to catch up, many opportunities to respond, and over a week past the promised response time before Steve got CCed again.
The manager said on May 14 that he would get back by May 17, and failed to respond by May 25 despite an attempt to follow-up on May 19. If the manager's schedule, workload and working priorities were such that May 17 was unrealistic, then the manager should not have said he would get back on May 17.
While the obvious case can be made that someone could have been more professional in this situation (as with almost any situation) - there is very little in terms of expectation set here. No promises of consequence were made, no binding contracts... and for all we know, the behaviour of the applicant in this situation was part of the hiring manager's decision process (whatever that might be)
Realistically, I'd say that that kind of move, trying to embarrass someone you want something from in front of his boss's boss's boss, can only have negative consequences.
As for the consequences of trying to escalate, it is true that it tends to upset the person you escalated in front of. However it is also true that it can motivate them to actually return to your case. I've seen organizations where it was a guaranteed disaster to use that strategy, and others where it was an effective way to get things done.
If I've seen that much variation between organizations within one country, how much more variation could there be between organizations across multiple countries with multiple cultures?
Any time someone emails you about acquiring you, hiring you, sponsoring you, etc, just assume the actual odds of it happening are about 1%, and be happily surprised if something eventually comes of it.
If they really, really want you, they'll be hitting you up every chance they get.
If you email Steve Jobs and he says, "I'm sending you a new iPad in the mail. Just send us your address." Are you happier that he responded then if he hadn't (except for the fact that you now have a good blog story to tell).
Being polite would have been "thanks for contacting us. As you can imagine we're swamped with work, but we are interested in this. I'm going to have to put this on the backburner and get back to it when I can. No promises. I'll follow up with you when it looks like there's a good fit schedulewise. Thanks."
I feel like the Apple engineer is being penalized for being polite. A lot of people would have just said "Thanks but we're busy". It looks like he genuinely wanted to look at it but never got around to it. The OP demonstrated some bad behavior by jumping multiple levels and CCing Jobs. When someone does that to me and CCs my management chain, he or she rarely gets the help they want - they've ticked me off and my management chain is going to trust me to deal with things.
The OP mentions that he posted this just to show how bad Apple's corporate culture was. Though I doubt that's why this was posted, I actually thought this showed some good culture from Apple. The CEO CCes someone down the stack and then trusts his call. That's what you want your management to do.
Across all this, I can't believe the OP thought he was looking at a possible acquisition by AAPL. At best, Patrick Gates was demonstrating polite engineer interest. The OP needs to learn to take a hint and how to deal with email communication.
I find it hard to believe that you can't spend 30s to shoot a quick email. I think you "think" you're being polite, but you're not. Leading someone on for weeks isn't being polite. That girl who you wanted to date, who leads on for a year, but always has other plans when you go to pick her up isn't being polite. She may think she is, but really she's being selfish.
"Thanks but we're busy" is the right thing to say if you're busy. And if you get busy later say, "Hey, we just got busy, gonna need to put this on hold. Don't know for how long". Took me about 5s to write.
Respect the time of other people as much as you respect your own time (because apparently your time is so valuable that you can't break 30s to send an email). That's being polite.
Also, the OP should know that this stuff happens all the time. And people who want a response send a polite ping request and would say that "If I don't hear back, I'll go ahead with <foo>" or "I'll assume <foo>". The OP didn't do that and went straight to the top which was a terrible move again.
At best, someone trying to be polite. At worst, someone being drowned in work and not communicating how busy they are (and being sick in the middle too).
Extrapolating and calling that some sign of corporate bad culture is bad form.
And speaking of bug reports, I used to run a team and when I started they'd get customer reports and then say "Won't Fix" and delete the report. One of the first things I did was to make sure every customer got a reply. Sometimes it was just "Sorry, this bug isn't going to get fixed this release." The satisfaction from our enthusiast base shot through the ceiling.
Again, I agree with a lot of what you say. The OP didn't handle it well. But with that said, the engineer still wasn't being polite. I don't think he was a jerk. As you note, it is common for people in our field to simply not respond. But it's not how I do thing
Edit: This response is in reference to the post below me.
Email makes it even worse.
No matter if you are right or wrong, I can imagine that Apple doesn't like being taught about what they should do. I imagine they think they have a fairly good idea as to what they should do. Maybe your attitude turned them off a little. Just a guess, though.
Maybe this dude would do something for Android where his time and effort would, hopefully, be more appreciated.
What I got: OP at the level of spam mailing Apple saying that he is the #1 superstar Ace to improve iTunes only to be told to "Get Bent."
It's business, not personal. They have so many things going on, it's a bit like trying to get your resume noticed.
Do something crazy, or obnoxious, or out of the blue that will get you noticed NOW. Then show them how, if they don't pay attention to you, it will cost them money.
I think you mean "impolite", not "unethical". Keeping someone waiting doesn't really have a moral value one way or another.
Secondly, unless you are Margaret Mead or an anthropologist of equal stature, you're not qualified to talk about what is polite in ALL cultures. It might be impolite in YOUR culture, but that doesn't necessarily apply to other cultures.
This wasn't too bad. All things aside, I don't think Apple was interested in acquiring you. You did the best you could. They did the best they could. I really don't think you pestering them would matter much if they really wanted your technology.
Then they keep going right back to develop and improve apple products. Why keep going back?
Sunk cost? By the time you've mastered the intricacies of Objective C and a gazillion NextStep toolbox calls (or whatever they're called nowadays) what else are you gonna do?
Wireframe = bottom line and the business requirements and strategies. Everything else on top, giving out free WWDC videos, etc., that's all extra. And it's great when it's available.
But in negotiations you have to look at it in terms of wireframe mode. Otherwise, you'll focus on the wrong local extrema, etc.
Otherwise, the story is dumb because it isn't "almost got acquired." It's "dude gets excessively excited because of a couple of emails." Just reread the Panic Audion story for something interesting: http://www.panic.com/extras/audionstory/
"""Thanks Steve.
I’m a bit disappointed.
Wish you all the best and looking forward to seeing more innovative products and services from Apple.
Kandarp"""
sounds very "Thank you sir may I have another?" to me.
This is also generally true for open source projects and I'm not surprised the same applies for Apple.
OP: you screwed up. you have noone to blame but yourself.
1) Author emails Steve Jobs about algorithm to improve Appstore's discover-ability problem. 2) Steve replies. 3) Author gets strung along by a semi cooperating engineer. 4) A month and a few emails later, he is told: we are not interested.
- At some point the engineer casually mentions that if he (the Author) incorporated, Apple could acquire him (i.e. hire him).
The first email is pretty professional, concisely describing a problem and solution, which got him the initial probing. But if it turns out to be negative in the end, its really nobody to blame.