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Comment by jpdoctor | Hacker News Reader

$2-4M/person, just for the people. Boy does this sound like the telecom bubble, and the internet bubble before that.

The music is playing, find a chair.

That's just incredible. Milk made one application, gave it away for free, summarily shut it down, and sold for $15 - $30 million. I understand these guys are very talented, and that Google was buying the talent more than the product, but that's quite a price for some gifted people!

> quite a price for some gifted people!

Every time I saw this happen in the 90s the result was the same: Small team shows up in big company after big $$, gets frustrated with big company BS, doesn't really care and runs down the game clock until vesting is nearly complete, leaves without fanfare.

I'm sure there must be counter examples, please let me know some if you have them.

"I'm sure there must be counter examples"

Measure Map was a small team acquired by google that made a pretty analytics app for blogs and they went on to overhaul Google Analytics, which at the time still look pretty rough because it was an acquired app (Urchin) that was made for power users.

That team worked pretty well. After everyone vested, Jeff Veen put the band back together and they started cranking out other apps, first WikiRank and then Typekit, which was just bought by Adobe.

I can see the parallels with Milk: 1) a small interdisciplinary team that works well together and with a kickass designer (Daniel Burka) that has a knack for making the complex look simple, and 2) an app like Google+ that's just as important to their new core mission as Analytics was to their old one and also has similar room for improvement.

Two team-centric acquisitions that Google has made in recent years: Aardvark and Slide. Both were cases of products that were mostly ahead of their time or just-off re: product-market fit, and had genius teams. As far as I know, the majority of both teams are still at Google.

Max Levchin left Google and Aardvark was shut down.

Google had Foursquare in house (called Dodgeball) but couldn't execute.

Android is the best counter-example I can think of.

max levchin -> slide max ventilla -> aardvark

Very little of the Aardvark team is left at Google, and those who are are scattered across different teams.

What has become of the Slide properties that Google inherited? What do they do with Slide stuff now?

Andy Rubin and the Android team had a pretty big impact on Google.

That was one of few acquisitions were Google actually wanted the product, and needed it badly. Mobile was Google's main growth area for years, until the social black hole opened last year or so.

Bret Taylor at Facebook.

That's a good point. In his current role he is essentially the top technical person in the company.

I wonder if the reason alot of acquired entrepreneurs leave is that they are used to having so much authority and latitude that getting a middle manager role at google just feels like wearing a straight jacket.

Thanks for the counterexample. Just to be clear: His vesting clock is done?

He didn't exactly get picked up to be some random engineer in a big corp.

Yep...why go through the normal interview process to work at Google when you can get acqui-hired, get paid the same, but get a million-dollar "signing bonus"?

Milk was a rather quick flip, but if you consider a more average 4 year run to acquisition, and also consider the risk factor, isn't so much obviously better than just getting a job with Google salary and stock from the start.

Don't hate the player, hate the game my friend.

Well, keep on hating the player and miss all the action then.

Do remember when the bubble collapses, you will be hurt far more than the players who already made their millions and can weather the collapse.

why not hate both. everyone has a choice.

b/c if 99% of us were placed in that situation, we'd take the money

So talented that they couldn't build a product that netted profit...

So I heard this hundred times before and while it feels like Google (in this example) is making mistake, perhaps the second bottom here is that they wanted to shut down a competitor (at some field) and the nice way of doing it is to acquire. Then Google won't care if they find themselves behind gold cage of Google or not. They may leave or whatever. I don't think dropping $30MM is a big problem for Google either. For me or you that may be a waste, for Google it is 1) drop in the ocean 2) cheap way to shut them down.

0.1% of Google's capitalization just to knock out 15 people is not a sustainable strategy.

Ack, no, it's 0.01% for 8 people. Slightly more sustainable than I thought.

I remember hearing in 2008 that Google valued engineers at 1-3m per. At Google's scale, an engineer can theoretically create at least that much value over a normal tenure (and denies their competition access to that resource).

Google makes $1.2M/yr/employee... Presumably quite a bit more if you count dollars per engineer. I know it's not quite so simple as "add an engineer and make more revenue", but it seems correlative.

It's a talent bubble, and while it sounds ridiculous it's not (completely) unjustified. The idea mine for the current generation of the Internet is less verdant than it once was, and so the cost of talent is escalating.

Couple that with the new trend in 'Big Data' and the talent that is out there needs to attach itself to an entity that has the resources to provide that (often proprietary) data.

No. Suppose these 8 guys are paid $150k a year on average. Engineers, good ones at least, bring in more than they cost. In some cases like Instagram and Facebook, the ratio of users to engineers is in the millions. Google is similar. When you also bring into account the caché of someone like Rose, the lifetime earnings from that team probably well exceeds what was spent to aquire them.

And how do you think the reasoning went during the telecom and internet bubbles? Hint: Exactly the same.

I encountered competing business plans which went along the lines of: Hire a team of 10 badass engineers, sell for $10-20M. It was a helluva time to hire people.

All employees should bring in more than they cost. Even the fry guy at McDonalds. Otherwise why would you employ them?

... in aggregate. there are lots of people in even small companies that work for "cost centers"...

Even "cost centers" are a net benefit, unless something is horribly broken.

Maybe you don't have the data to make that determination.

Maybe fries aren't profitable yet, but you're hoping to make them become so.

Maybe you have to have fries on the menu even though you make more money off soda.

I'm sure there are a few people that Google employs "Because awesome." The self-driving cars thing comes to mind, though I'm sure that could be explained by giving people another hour every day to sit on the internet looking at ads.

Currently all of the Google Maps data for the US (and increasingly, other parts of the globe) is generated in-house by the street view cars - they don't just generate the data for street view, they also generate most of the data for the actual road layout of the maps now, too.

If the cars drove themselves, instead of Google having to pay actual people to drive around every single road on the planet all the time, that would be a pretty huge cost saving, I would imagine.

Your argument assumes that that "caché" will translate into instant/increased earnings. That is far from a given.

caché = hidden http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cach%C3%A9

maybe what you really mean is "cachet" http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/cachet I know it doesn't have an accent

You are correct. I don't use the word often (apparently) and always thought the correct spelling for "cachet" was with the little e. Thanks for the tip!

Niggle : Cachet is the version that means 'prestige; distinction', caché is 'hidden' - both from 'cacher' (to hide, French).

cachet

>When you also bring into account the caché of someone like Rose

Caché with whom exactly?

That's like a compensation for opportunity cost incurred by giving up startups for a while.

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