General questions about "talent acquisitions" ... when it happens, what's to keep the talent from leaving? Is it generally a scenario where the talent wouldn't sell if they didn't want to stay on board–or are there also clauses in the acquisition that actually prevent them from leaving?
My understanding is that usually a significant part of the payout is in stock, which will vest over a couple years.
Facebook stock? haha
The latter. Always. Usually with extra incentive to ensure that you are productive over the period you are there.
But how does this work with the non-owning 'talent'? The owners of a company can't force/guarantee that their engineers are going to stay, right?
Vesting. Nearly all startups grant equity options to employees, and these options vest over a certain period of time (usually 4 years). While employment is usually at-will, if you leave, you lose all of your unvested stock (hence, the incentive to stick around).
You can offer vesting or other stock type transactions to secure loyalty, or it can even be as simple as offering retention bonuses to key staff members. It's not overly complex, and talent would be assessed at individual performance and job function levels.
Retention bonuses.
One simple way is to make that a condition of the sale.
The second is to defer part of the payment until that condition is met.
The third is 'golden handcuffs' though I doubt that would be very effective with this crowd.
Partially, but Friendfeed has a lot of technology that Facebook would want. They have a good grasp of real-time and search, they have the full firehose to Twitter (which is not something Twitter would have given to Facebook otherwise -- Google is desperate for such access), and the team of course. I don't think Frienfeed is at the top of its category either, which means that it probably was affordable.
Access to Twitter's "full firehose" can easily be turned off, if Twitter doesn't want Facebook to access it they can make that happen instantly.
True, depending on the agreement they have in place.
Yeah, no kidding. Does it become a real acquisition when it's really a disguised signing bonus? :-)
Assuming the acquisition was for $20-$40 million+ in stock, that's way outside the signing bonus territory.
For the man who built gmail and his hand picked team of techs, $20-40 million (less the actual company value) is probably a pretty good deal, especially for a company that really needs to make some cash in the next year or two.
It must be. There's not much interesting about Friendfeed that isn't done easier on Facebook.
Assuming that this type of information is worth anything, Friendfeed delivers insight into corelations like 'how many FB users also do use SN XYZ regularly', or not?