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Comment by wavefunction | Hacker News Reader

I guess it's strange because the founders of successful startups have generally founded a successful startup.

Paying $100,000,000 up-front to someone who hasn't yet delivered the same success seems to be putting the cart before the horse.

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The $100,000,000 was not paid upfront. It was paid due to the success of the project.

Success is defined by Google. Clearly Google thought he delivered or they wouldn't have paid him.

I'm guessing it was tied to shipping that autonomous car with no steering wheel that they made awhile back.

page's argument is that waymo as a whole was successful, so waymo as a whole got paid a lot. because levandowski was an early waymo employee and pretty senior, he had a large 'stake' in waymo's bonus payout.

however - and this is page's big point - that payout has little to do with his overall contributions to the project, and rather that he had early responsibilties and stuck around.

Cruise was acquired by GM for $1B, at a time when it was a fraction of the scale & sophistication of Waymo. So how does Waymo not count as a success when you consider the comparables...?

Cruise was not acquired for $1B. http://www.businessinsider.com/gm-cruise-automation-price-20...

GM CFO said $581M. Sorry, I was off by a factor of 2x... but my point still stands. If Cruise was worth $581M, then Waymo is worth a lot more.

http://fortune.com/2016/07/21/more-on-what-gm-paid-to-buy-cr...

581 million

Haven't you met the people who work up on the roof?

Seriously. I would have been happy to go there and accept a mere $1M bonus (saving Google shareholders $99M), and I probably would have done better than "leave mid-way through, copy a bunch of docs, and go to work for a competitor".

It's the same bogus excuse for outrageous CEO pay: "We just can't seem to find anyone good without offering 1000X more than normal people make."

The upfront payment sweetens the pot. Now the 'cofounder' has the choice of 100 million on the table v/s say a much larger POTENTIAL payout 5-10 years down the line.

Are there really people who would turn down a hundred million dollars for a chance at a larger potential payout in 5-10 years? Are these people even members of Homo sapiens?

A $100MM bonus seems like a career-ending bonus to me. How do you keep going to work after that?

> Are there really people who would turn down a hundred million dollars for a chance at a larger potential payout in 5-10 years?

Sure, and the numbers get far larger than $100 million.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin for example, turned down very large acquisition offers, including for at least a billion dollars from Yahoo, at a time when they didn't even have a serious business model.

Mark Zuckerberg turned down several large offers for Facebook when it didn't have a serious functional business. He could have walked away nearly a billionaire before Facebook had even printed a dollar of profit.

Bill Gates turned away numerous, large acquisition offers in the first ~10 years of Microsoft's existence. IBM was interested in buying them for years.

The Snapchat owners turned down ~$3 billion from Google to go public instead as an exit. Even after the beating their stock has taken in the last few months, the market cap of Snap is $15 billion today.

> The Snapchat owners turned down ~$3 billion from Google

from Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg turned down an offer from Yahoo. Evan Spiegel, from FB.
Plenty of CEOs have career ending incomes / bonuses already.

The difference is at that point Mark had something worth that much money and had already spent several years building it. If he decided in 1 year he was done he could have probably found another buyer at a valuation high enough to retire unless he royally screwed up the company.
Turning down $100mm when you have nothing of value yet is very different imo

Yes, but they turned it down to work on what they liked. This is just paying you upfront to do that. Granted you don't own it...

I'm not positive, but I think Spiegel already made FU money as part of a funding round prior to the FB offer.
Can anyone confirm?

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