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Comment by 0cf8612b2e1e | Hacker News Reader

They will be fine, but maybe they want to be FANG rich. You do not get there if the already big companies play by different rules and can out spend the minute you pose a threat.

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They're already in most of the hospitals in America. There was one attached to my daughter's foot for 100+ days. I don't think they care about FAANG at all. They're not a software company. Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

>Look them up - this is big companies fighting, not David and Goliath.

Massimo is 400x smaller than Apple. WTF are you talking about like they're in the same weight class?

Maybe if Masimo had made Lamego a significant shareholder, he wouldn't have left his "CTO" role to become a mere Apple employee. Masimo is an $8b company. They created a spinoff called Cercacor which Lamego got to be CTO of. My best guess is it wasn't a real startup like we're used to in the Silicon Valley sense. There wasn't any real opportunity for him to gain generational wealth there if he was successful. Apple not only hired him, but thirty other of their employees too, because Apple recognized that their talent was worth more than a licensing deal. That's the issue with these non-valley enterprises. They're very feudal in the sense that the owners treat their engineers and scientists like ordinary workers, expect total loyalty, and pull out their legal guns when they don't get their way. Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals. A court later found Lamego hadn't made his moves entirely fairly, but I believe if you look at the big picture, Apple's behavior wasn't predatory, but rather liberatory.

> Big tech companies like Apple are more meritocratic and generally offer smart people much better deals.

It’s mindblowing how big of a gap this is for these non-tech companies. I work for a company that sold to PE. The owners walked away with the vast majority of a 1.5 billion deal.

I asked if employees were given anything. “Sure. Some got as much as 50k!” I was told.

Using some standard equity math for early engineers, I back of napkined that the 25 year tenure engineers, if they were at big tech, should have gotten low 7 figures. Nope. They got 50k out of 1.5 billion.

(No, PE had no say on how that 1.5 billion was divided up for those of you quick to blame PE.)

Yeah tech startups are great like that. Big tech companies are even better. With them, you don't have to wait for a successful exit, or even work there that long, to get your low seven figures. No one in America is working harder to restore the middle class than the tech industry. Even the person who cleans my house makes more than 50k. Meanwhile legacy enterprises and private equity are doing everything in their power to destroy it. This is a moral righteous struggle for the heart of America, which makes it such a shame that Lamego was found by the courts to have acted dishonorably, but we mustn't forget who's side we're on.

> maybe they want to be FANG rich

Their (limited) levels.fyi data does not indicate this is one of their goals.

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