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Comment by vabmit | Hacker News Reader

Crunchbase says Wavii only has five employees and only took ~$2MM in funding. So, I would bet it's more than $100K total. The funding is all listed as a 2010-07 seed round. I expect they raised more than that. But, given their acquisition price and business model it sounds like things worked on well for them and at least the founders were well vested. Or, did you mean actual cash excluding any GOOG options/RSUs?

My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4.

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Techcrunch says 25 employees.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/google-buys-wavii-for-north...

"My understanding is that a 4 year lock-in for non-execs (techies) is a standard requirement by Google during acquisitions. I've heard of some people negotiating it down to 3. But, almost everyone I know got 4."

Or as one of the people I met at Google related "Sometimes they let you leave early, sort of like time off for good behavior or something." :-)

I've seen retention contracts run the gamut from 12 months to 5 years, and with and without earnout clauses. It really depends on way to many factors like how directly applicable the tech is and how special the people who built it are (intrinsic expertise).

That lock-in is on the bonus Google offers, not the payout on equity. At least in the two acquisitions I've been privy to details about.

Acquisition prices in the news are usually vague, and could be cash + earnout over the golden handcuff period.

This is IMO an example of why Crunchbase is unreliable and essentially useless.

4 year lock-in only applies to non-execs? What is it for execs?

With this, an engineer at a startup has a worse deal?

I'm sure it's situation dependent with execs. If you have a very mature company in a new vertical w/ significant revenue (like a YouTube) and they want you to continue to run the product that would be a very different situation than a small acquihire where the execs may just be essentially engineers or dev team leaders at Google. Of course, the execs likely organized their start-up governance in a way that gives them negotiating strength in the deal. I can't imagine a start-up where the engineers would be involved in the negotiation and decision making beyond their own transition/retention.

Lots of execs go on and found the next startup when the deal closes.

I imaging the average employee got less than 1% of the company, assuming .5% of 80% of 30 million, each is looking at at most 120k. I say most of them got less then 100k. Hopefully not locked in for 4 years, which is like 25k a year. Sigh. My bonus is more than that....

Less than 1% seems low to me. Also, we'd be talking about options or stock (likely RSUs) not cash. GOOG was trading around $390/sh 4 years ago. So, if 4 years ago you were offered $150K (which I still think is low) in RSUs @ $390/sh for your start-up equity with some small vesting tranches each year and a large full vesting at the end of 4 years (and you held onto it all), you'd have a little more than $310K today plus your GOOG salary and bonuses for those four years. Not bad for doing ~5 years as dev ops at a start-up like Wavii.

GOOG has pretty much topped. and I know several early stage startup that gives out .1%.. Developers are so stupid sometimes....

Less then 1% is pretty typical when you consider an option pool is 10-20% at the most. With 20 employees, I'd bet only a quarter of the options at most have been doled out since you usually save the big grants for exec hires.

They also get a nice job at google and probably relocation to somewhere warmer.

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