Chris Dixon is a veteran investor and entrepreneur, with enormous visibility in the tech world. Contacts with potential acquirers are a non-issue for him.
A poor CS fellow could have created a version of Hunch that was 100x better and they still would have 1,000x less of an exit opportunity as compared to any startup Dixon founded.
Get real.
Perhaps your hypothetical fellow should focus on building a "lifestyle business" instead of trying to get big and then get acquired...
Grandparent makes it sound like Dixon pulled this off in his spare time. He assembled a team of A-level engineers, then secured millions in funding so they could develop an awesome recommendation engine with almost no clear revenue stream. I challenge anyone to find a CS grad who can match that in his or her spare time.
EDIT: restructured on second read.
Carl Henderson of Flickr fame looked like an A-level engineer back then (especially with his O'reilly book) yet some of the Flickr engineers baffled when they saw the Flickr codebase.
Sometime it's all smoke and marketing hype.
This isn't some naive Bayes spam filter from 1992. Hunch is really, really accurate.
Netscape's code was pretty crappy too.
But hacks will always be hacks regardless the discussion of "getting product out of the door" vs "never delivering".
I think i must have been the first person who really drilled into his knowledge, because he was more interested in talking about who he knew, projects he had been associated with etc.
I got a funny feeling about him, and asked that he do a simple code project. A week overdue later, he asks for our FTP credentials to upload it. I say that we don't run ftp anywhere, and that he needs to scp to the box. He said he had no idea that ssh can 'copy files'. urgh. He later worked out that his GUI FTP client supported SSH and got so excited about it that he messaged me to tell me about it.
I have never judged the capabilities of a developer based on reputation since.
Josh Bloch admitted himself that he's kind of not really "up"-ing his knowledge/skill when it comes to tools (git, eclipse, intellij, etc) but he writes damn good code with just Emacs.
He knows his Math & Stats to debunk benchmark and stuff like that and he knows the pitfalls of complexity.
he also fell apart in the code test, which was pretty simple (using a library I had written, which he made a copy of and edited). I have no idea how this guy got his reputation, but it seemed to be more amongst non-tech tech people, if you know what I mean (who are easier to bullshit, I guess)
when I started my career I worked with a bunch of old IBM mainframe guys who had no idea about modern web stuff but were some of the best programmers I have ever met. I could take a problem to them in a language they didn't know (so for eg. VB.NET) and they would talk me through it.
While Dixon's reputation is a great asset, I wouldn't say it's a multiple-orders-of-magnitude difference.
This type of thinking is why the valley is so full of zombie companies pumped up with capital, but with no real traction or any way of ever being profitable
PG and many speakers at startup school repeatedly said that its easy to spot the ones who are just doing it because they want to be "that guy" like Zuckerberg - the ones who want to play the game. Instead of starting a company to figure out what customers want.
What motivates you to start a company is really important. Especially during the downswings that kills most startups (google "trough of sorrows").
I would agree, and it's a damn good talent acquisition. Hunch's team is made almost exclusively of engineers who (a) went to some of the best CS programs in the world (CMU, MIT, Stanford), and (b) really really really know their shit (just have a 5-minute convo with one of them).
Here in NY, Hunch had a reputation for opportunistic hiring. They had lots of funding and an incredible core team, so they'd only hire engineers that astounded them. That's a great way to set yourself up for a talent acquisition.
40% of them will start their own companies once their non-competes expire.
1. No dev is worth $1m. Their skills may generate as much and more, but only in a specific context. Being great at catching a football is worth $50m in context of the NFL, $0 without it.
2. You can't really buy talent. At best, you can keep it, working at 1/2 of its ability, until fully vested and moves on. Alternately, eBay could create an environment as challenging and attractive as Hunch - but (a) by definition, it's almost impossible and (b) if you could pull it off, you could hire the similar talent for much less than $80m.
I'd think walking through the halls of those CS programs offering $250k a year in salary would get a a bunch of A-Level talent at a much lower price then they paid for Hunch.
Ebay's been on a spending spree this past year and I'd say this is one of the better deals they've made, depending on how long they've locked in Hunch's team.