That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.
Not chump change by any means, but skilled engineers in Silicon Valley can easily make $250K/year in total compensation. If a startup takes about 3 years of ramen wages to come to fruition and then the founders are locked up for another year while they vest, the plain old employee will have made about $1M in the time that the startup founder made maybe $2.5M. Startup founder is still ahead, but they took on all the risk of their startup failing and them getting nothing, and the difference is only about a factor of 2 instead of an order of magnitude.
A talent acquisition is not usually the founders' first choice. What they get in return for the risk of the startup failing is the chance of a really big success. A talent acquisition is usually a backup plan. As a backup plan it's a pretty good deal.
(A talent acquisition is sometimes the founders' first choice if it happens early enough. Then it's a better deal because the money is divided by less time.)
I thought acquisitions were one of the last surviving relics of indentured servitude, besides universities. My guess is that it's still a better deal when you adjust for risk, likelihood of large success, and fully look at the expected value matrix. Though I'm skeptical that you can really discuss probability in the context of multiple people's talents, without historical data (the best proxy I see is that you were _chosen_ by pg or other tier 1 VC, and said VC has this historical record, etc.)
I'm not saying nobody gets paid that all, but developer compensation needs to be more realistically looked at on this forum. I'd say the majority make less than $100k, and $150k or more puts you in the top 5 percentile.
Another consideration is you learn a lot more than you generally would at a big company. There's a lot of value in knowledge and many (despite it sounding corny) deem that as invaluable--worth forgoing 100K/year in salary.
In the bay area at least, it would be really hard to be working on something worthwhile and remain totally sequestered from a network. The bigger problem is not getting caught up in it to the exclusion of spending time working.
I'm sure it is different outside the bay area, and is absolutely different outside the USA.
[1] I'm not considering taxes and so on, but the basic idea of leverage still applies.
How do talent acquisitions happen? Do they usually start with exploring partnership opportunities?
You shouldn't assume anything about what your job duties will be in a big company, even if it's written into your contract. Big companies have an internal logic that often makes no sense to the outside world, and usually depends upon what the decision makers are paying attention to at the moment. Priorities change.
Wave had its own issues, mainly due to being political and inviolate, from what has been written outside google. It was really sad to see etherpad get caught up in that.
Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service?
I don't know, I must be missing something.
For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible.
You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you.
But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it.
Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead.
You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off.
The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.
Citation needed.
Congratulations != huge success(in the big picture sense)