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Comment by abletonlive | Hacker News Reader

"overfunded" is a weird way to talk about a tech company that is incredibly profitable.

It is known there were many developers without really much work to do that were hired only to be denied to competitors. Maybe it was cleaned up in the meantime

Big companies hired a lot, but I don’t think this specifically is true? In theory a high-value engineer would be productive, or else they aren’t worth stealing.

The simpler explanation seems more correct here — there was a lot of product fluff and a lot of headcount allocated to build that fluff.

Revenue is a funding source. Companies with too much money sometimes made really dumb decisions with that money.

The fact that one division of Google is wildly profitable does not exempt other parts of the company from criticism of their financially dubious choices.

Net profit can't be used as a measure of both "funding" and "value generation" while saying that a company is "overfunded" because it doesn't provide enough "value". Come back to your senses.

I'm genuinely not sure if you're not understanding, or deliberately ignoring my point.

I'll assume the former and try again. Maybe you didn't realize I'm not the person you originally replied to?

If a company is profitable, they have funds. The funds generated by the profits, can be used to fund additional internal projects. If the bucket of funds from profits gets ridiculously large, then it may begin to be used for vanity projects, like gutting an AI company, or building a gold statue of the founder. It seems reasonable to call companies spending on mostly-useless excesses "overfunded".

I'm not misunderstanding anything. It's just that the idea of a massively profitable company being labeled "over-funded" when excess profit is used in a way that you find disagreeable is stupid. It doesn't matter how well they allocate their revenue.

Stop looking at the entire world through the eyes of VC, because it doesn't work.

You're not funding google by paying for youtube, you're buying a service.

You didn't "overfund" your pizza shop that hired a stripper for friday night vibes, and neither did 99.99% of customers that paid google for their service offerings.

You just bought a pizza. Put down the VC podcasts

Gotcha, you're just being mean. You've got a bone to pick with VCs, I guess, so you've declared I listen to VC podcasts, see the world like one, and am using a stupid idiom.

That's fine. I'm going to continue referring to corporations that blow lots of money on random intra-industry dick measuring matches because they can as "overfunded", and you can continue expressing your opinion to anyone who will listen that this one person on the internet used an idiom that you think is dumb because it implies something other than "that person profited, therefore they did something right and therefore whatever they do with that money is correct and intelligent and never ever wasteful or dumb."

It's kind of their prerogative to spend their money how they like. If it's anti-competitive then you can hope that regulation exists to prevent that behaviour. As a shareholder you can complain that they will stop this value igniting behaviour. As an investor if you believe this behaviour is irrational you can short their stock and hope that the market is efficient and the share price will reflect the igniting value in their multiple.

As a bystander and outsider it is hard to isolate the value igniting behaviour from the moonshot behaviour. Shareholders love to gut a business of its risk taking and excess behaviour for predictable and inflated margins (and dividends) but the past 20+ years of our megacap companies is that they have continued to "innovate" in spite of all their inefficiencies.

I always have a chuckle when I recall how shareholders tried to oust Zuck for buying Instagram for 1B...

These vanity hires do seem frothy and reminiscent of dotcom style behaviour. But "AI" clearly will be game changing much like the internet was, and who at this stage can say what is worth recruiting people at the forefront of commercialising the tech right now

It's fair to suggest a different word or phrasing, but you're coming off as hostile, not constructive.

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