Are Talent Acquisitions a Sign of a New Bubble?

I appreciated pg's numbers:

'Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, the high-profile incubator and investor, answers with some numbers. Of the more than 310 start-ups that have passed through his startup factory, a mere 25 have been sold and about 18 of those were talent acquisitions. he said. That leaves more than 285 that are still toiling away. While some of those are hugely successful — Airbnb and DropBox, for example — many are not.

“You cannot get yourself acquired on demand,” Mr. Graham said. “You have to do the start-up like you mean it.”'

An understanding of this isn't complete without reading the Gawker take on the original NYT article.

I've worked with recruiters enough to know that they get a bare minimum of $20k to hook an average engineer up with a mid-level job. The rates go up with the position and the demand.

With that in mind, I honestly don't see a problem with paying $500k per engineer if they come with a great product that can improve the buyer's position. It isn't what I'd think of as a sign of a bubble, but a different way to spend recruiting money.

Companies have been using acquire to hire for a long time and the fact that there are more companies being acquired doesn't by itself mean there's a bubble. When startups with no product(color) or no revenue model(flipboard) are raising money at 9-figure valuations, that's a much better indicator of a bubble than the fact that a lot of companies are being sold right now.

Can we just not post articles of the form "[Is/Are] X a sign of a new bubble" from now on? Let's just all assume that everything up to and including oxygen metabolism is a possible sign of a new bubble, and get on with our lives, shall we?

no, its a sign of the velocirapture.

seriously, everything is a sign of the new bubble now.