Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though.

It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplification with about as much nuance.

Smart people get emotionally manipulated on every other kind of politics at the behest of the new oligarchs, why not this one?

View on HN

I agree except the part about the new oligarchs doing the manipulating. I think they are manipulating themselves, sucked into these brain rot machines as much as anyone.

I heard a Thiel interview recently where he ranted about Greta Thunberg and the antichrist and used a bunch of very online Xhitter bubble terms like referring to low efficacy as “low-T” and I was like this guy needs to touch grass. It didn’t even make a lot of sense.

That's funny in a dark way, especially it being Thiel given that this entire movement/era traces a clear intellectual and emotional lineage to his activism all the way back at least as far as his writing in the student libertarian rag at Stanford in like 94 (and apparently a childhood fixation with Quenta Silmarillien exceeding even my own).

Trapped in his own Intellectual Dark Web one might say.

Yeah, Greta Thurnburg is making the frogs "low-T". What a bunch of fucking losers.

It's never made sense for me (as a gay man) how a gay man could get sucked into the fringe alt right manosphere. That whole ecosystem is antithetical to you

I mean, these people aren't well my guy. It's not a huge stretch to imagine a bunch of repressed self-loathing around one's identity being at or near the core of it.

Thiel grew up in the 90s. Whatever one deems the tolerance situation today, it was worse then.

More like the 80s but true. Also maybe worth remembering that Thiel was outed by Gawker. He didn't come out as gay of his own volition and perhaps never would have.

It makes perfect sense if you think about it from Thiel's perspective. Other than legal technicalities like marriage, the consequences of being gay are mainly determined by societal attitudes and not electoral politics. No legal changes that the Republicans would make do anything to stop a powerful billionaire from being openly gay. So it makes perfect sense that he would favor his business interests when he takes sides in politics.

It just happened with Windsurf and Google.

Windsurf getting "bought" such that the employees got nothing is a great recent example of why you want Lina Khan seeing to it that a healthy and well-regulated M&A market is in effect. That's precisely the kind of lowbrow shit you can thank her bought and paid for successors for bringing you the next decade's worth of.

So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?

Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?

> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?

What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring.

> Isn’t that the same thing

Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring".

And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.

It wasn’t an acquisition - Google offered the employees they wanted a shit ton of cash to leave.

What laws keep companies from hiring people they want to hire who are legally allowed to work in the country?

This is exactly what Google did, it hired employees.

This wasn't an acquisition, but it was really close to one. Whether or not the laws cover it right now, expanding acquisition laws into hiring out the core of a company would not be a big expansion. It wouldn't be a sea change in what types of hiring the FTC has control over.

So now you want companies to seek government approval before they can hire a certain number of people from a company? What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?

Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want the government to restrict who can be hired from a company or better yet, whether employees can accept better offers from another company? That’s only the other side of the coin of restricting employee movement based on non competes.

> seek government approval before

There's a neighboring comment that used almost the exact same wording that I already replied to.

In short: No.

> What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?

Is your startup like 10 people? Worth much less than a billion dollars? Then it's not big enough to be a problem.

So what laws do you suggest that the government pass that both stop Google from offering me a highly skilled and sought after AI professional (not really, we are speaking hypothetically) or my team and don’t suppress my ability to make as much money as the market will give me?

They can give just you a job at any time.

But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.

So they just give me a job as the leader, then other people want to follow. Is it them illegal for Google to offer other former coworkers a job? Isn’t that kind of like the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”?

So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off?

Am I paying more for search today because of the monopoly? Am I paying more for any of the free stuff that Google has because of advertising (that I block anyway)?

In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?

Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?

Just offering normal jobs would generally be fine, doing a big group deal that also comes with IP licensing would generally not be fine.

I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.

> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?

> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?

That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.

So the law is now that they can’t license the technology to companies that higher former employees?

You don’t see what kind of Kafkaesque mess these proposed laws are creating?

Who are we benefiting again?

The benefit is the same kind as from blocking a very small fraction of acquisitions. If you don't think the existing rules there are kafkaesque, then the small expansion shouldn't be a huge change. If you do, I'm not the person to argue with.

And these rules would very rarely come into effect.

It’s the same for who? The employees? The company that is not allowed to make money by licensing it technology?

If you don't understand why acquisitions might be blocked and the benefit of it then I'm not going to be the one to explain it.

I'm not here to defend the entire edifice of the FTC having control over acquisitions. I'm here to say that when they have that control, it should also include almost-but-not-quite-acquisitions.

But you aren’t arguing about acquisitions. You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.

You specifically said that in some cases if a company hired employees it should then be prevented from licensing the technology

And still haven’t given a good reason why it shouldn’t.

The “bad” acquisition is usually considered Instagram . But who cares if a toxic social media site acquires another one? Who was harmed?

I'm saying that what google did is effectively an acquisition except it broke the equity and it avoided regulation.

You keep making examples that are less clear-cut, but whatever I agree there are things a company can do that aren't effectively acquisitions. I'm not saying how to write the rule, I'm just saying google is on the wrong side.

> You are specifically saying that a company shouldn’t be allowed to license IP, shouldn’t be allowed to acquire the company and shouldn’t be allowed to hire the employees or some combination.

They're totally allowed to acquire the company... as long as the FTC doesn't say no. And they can do lots of those other things too.

I don't know how you got the impression that I think acquisitions should be blocked more than a fraction of a percent of the time.

Even further, google SHOULD have acquired the company instead of doing what they did.

The FTC caused this issue with over regulation and by creating an environment of fear that every acquisition is going to be scrutinized.

Google had no fiduciary duty to do what’s in the best interest of WindSurf’s investors.

Google had every right to give the WindSurf employees offers to leave. The employees had every right to accept the offers. There is no world where the government should have been involved in that part.

At that point, the Windsurf equity owners had two choices - either not license or license.

Which part should have been illegal? The FTC could have said “Google you can’t both get the employees and license the IP”. Google would have said “fine, we will just hire the talent and have them create something similar”. Windsurf would have been worse off.

Alternatively, Google could license the technology. Then the employees could say I would rather just work for Google. Would you then be okay with enforcing non competes even though they are currently illegal in California?

There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.

We actually saw something like that happen between Microsoft and OpenAI during the Altman fiasco. Microsoft had already licensed the technology and Altman was going to go to Microsoft and take OpenAI’s best people with him. Should the government have stepped in then and told Microsoft they can’t hire OpenAI employees?

> The FTC caused this issue with over regulation and by creating an environment of fear that every acquisition is going to be scrutinized.

Ridiculous. They intervene so rarely, even at the peak.

> Which part should have been illegal?

Not my problem to solve. Ever heard of "structuring" though? It's not unsolvable.

> There is no law that you can come up with that doesn’t make it worse for both the employees and Windsurf.

If doing an actual acquisition would have been allowed, that would have been better for them.

If it wouldn't have been allowed, then yes the hypothetical law is worse for them but it's an acceptable loss. Sorry you can't use a workaround to get the benefit of an illegal deal.

You still didn’t answer the question. Do you want to make it illegal for:

1. Google to hire the employees and force the employees to stay at the company and how?

2. Google to be able to hire the employees and then Windsurf not be allowed to license their IP to a company who is willing to give them a bunch of money?

The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.

What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?

Or in Figma/Adobe’s case. What if Adobe just said, Forget it, we will pay all of the developers we want a shit ton of money (less than $20 billion) to rebuild the entire application from scratch and leave the auxiliary staff behind. Would you also outlaw that?

In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?

> You still didn’t answer the question. Do you want to make it illegal for:

Perhaps telling Google they can do one or the other but not both. Or not both unless they want to treat it like an acquisition.

Again I'm taking it as a given that it's fine to restrict company actions. If you dislike that entire concept then take it up with the people that put FTC in charge of acquisitions, not me. Not every willing transaction should be legal.

> The reason that this shit show happened in the first place is because overzealous lawmakers and regulators put policies in place without thinking through the consequences.

Only if they allow this to succeed. If they slap it down then no company will attempt it again. They'll just file for acquisition.

> What exact policies and guidelines should they put in place?

I refuse. You're asking an unreasonable amount of detail from me.

> Figma/Adobe’s case

If they want to make individual job offers and not try to negotiate group things or talk to figma at all then they can go ahead and try.

I'd be surprised if they didn't already do that.

> In the current political environment, the best way to get FTC to approve a merger is to bribe the President (see Paramount). The way to make sure it doesn’t get approved is to do something the President doesn’t like. Do you really want to give this government mire power?

Even with the risk of corruption I prefer regulating acquisitions to allowing everything.

It's not about restrictions on hiring, you keep repeating that even though no one has advanced that proposal in the whole thread. You have absolutely crushed that strawman argument, congratulations.

It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historically been kept out of the courts for the most part because for the most part it has been in everyone's interests to keep the wheels greased on this (you'll notice old school VCs like Khosla are against fucking around in it in public forums).

Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal. At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".

If the trend becomes to just dissolve a startup the minute its worth anything and immediately partition it into exactly the pieces a giant company wants and zero out everyone else, this will have a massively destabilizing effect on a historical engine of innovation (see: OGs are against it on Twitter).

And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.

Stop talking about the government restricting hiring, no one said that.

The government caused the problem in the first place by making it harder for big companies to acquire smaller companies.

> It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity"

An employer has never had “property rights” to decide where I can and can’t work.

> Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal

The CEO while working for the company has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. But doesn’t have the responsibility not to leave if another company offers it more money or if other employees that like the CEO, they are free to reach out to the CEO and leave too.

> At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".

“Equity” in startups have always statistically been fools gold between dilution, preferred shares, etc.

> But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something"*

See previous comments about only the naive or true believers (but I repeat myself they are one in the same) are naive enough to believe in anything promised or implied by startups more than you will get paid X amount in cash for hours you work (and sometimes not even that).

> And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.

So the solution is for the government to pass more laws to fix the problems that the regulations it already put in place caused?

The property rights in question are the rights of the people who hold equity in the company. The legally unclear part because of inadequate precedent to know how a given case would be adjudicated in a given jurisdiction is what exactly "equity" means in the context of employee ownership in a technology startup (which gets different treatment of e.g. taxes and amortization schedules, "tech" is treated differently by the law in some ways that are crystal clear and in other ways that are less clear).

No one has proposed that anyone be barred from taking an offer of employment (that I've seen and interpreted that way anyways), that would be extremely unpopular with just about everyone.

What people are talking about is whether or not founders and VCs can de facto sell a company in terms of the real assets that people care about without distributing the proceeds to shareholders via a legal fiction that the one company disappeared (was written down or otherwise disposed of) and tada over here some job offers and other compensation appeared in just that amount but for a different group of people.

This is a plot device in the Sorkin film about Facebook. They're in Thiel's office getting the new investment and the numbers guy is like "we're going to get you clean paperwork in Delaware" and Thiel looks up: "So who, exactly, is Eduardo Saverin?" I very much doubt the movie was a terribly accurate portrayal, but that's the TLDR for lay people: one company vanishes, another appears with the same assets, but different ownership.

Trying to make this about the federal government telling people they can't work for Google is bad faith. Stop with that shit.

The founders are employees too. Should they not be allowed to leave a company because they are founders? The entire scenario is that the investors aren’t getting anything because the company isn’t being acquired and the employees are being “poached”.

The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.

In the hypothetical lawsuit the damages would be money, the defendants would be the founders and investors, and the plantiffs would be employees with grants that got written down. No one knows how such a lawsuit would play out because it hasn't happened and looks unlikely to.

For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them owing money to former employees.

Enough with this, it's trolling at this point.

Okay, so I am founder of the company, I get VC funding. But I’m not “rich” by any means since I only have the play play wealth based on illiquid “equity”. I may not even have control over the company any more after much dilution.

I get an offer from Google where I am now making real money and have liquid RSUs coming. You think other employees should have the right to sue me because I left the company for a better offer?

The investors aren’t getting anything, in this case Google didn’t acquire the company, they hired the employees. Why would the investors be sued because employees left?

No, it really isn't. It's not remotely the FTCs job to regulate that type of thing, and I really don't think you would want it to be. Would you rather have a system where competing companies have to get government approval before extending offers to you? You know who would love that system? Google.

> have to get government approval before

That is not the only form of regulation, and not the form that would be applied here. This would be after the fact, going after companies that try to pull things like this.

But companies should be able to pull things like this. If a company isn't paying market rate I see no problem with a competitor destroying it by hiring away all its best employees.

If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem.

In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

There was no world where Windsurf was going to challenge Google and the same is true for the examples.

These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.

Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.

> These were regular old job offers.

They were not.

> Google didn’t want the “assets”.

They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.

You think Google could have but didn't acquire Windsurf, and instead hired away the top talent and discarded the rest because of regulatory scrutiny?

Is there any proof of this at all?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com