Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cromwellian | Hacker News Reader

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I think there's an either-or fallacy here, it could have been an attempt at an acqui-hire, but when the people talking to him tried to push it through, other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package.

Consider, a single-engineer company with an interesting app and talented engineer, just how much do you expect to be acquired for? Recognize that a $1M-2M offer is about what you could make in 4 years at Google at the appropriate level and with the appropriate amount of restricted stock units.

So, if the amount of compensation would be approximately the same, but the one pathway (acquisition) requires a lot more legal groundwork and expense, and the other doesn't (just extend an offer of employment with generous signing bonus)

I think there's a little bit of ego involved here. It's easy to believe you have a winning app that's going to be huge, and be insulted when other people don't see the potential. ("A mere engineer!? Me?! I'm an entrepreneur who should have more respect!"), but the reality is, very few apps on the app store take off like rocketships, most fail, and so unless you have unique very valuable IP, or have built up a lot of valuable data, chances are, most companies are going to view it as an acqui-hire.

Paul Graham was right, you talk to Corp Dev if you're very successful, or nor very successful (probably going to die). As Kenny Rogers said you've got to know when to fold 'em, and this could have been a situation to negotiate a nice big fat signing bonus.

Well put. Also as <abalone> suggested nearby, the author of the linked article, Max Christian, fumbled the exchange and instead of a million-dollar exit ended up with... what?

Instead of the claim of "I can easily get to twice £X million" -- in revenue? profit? valuation? -- it looks like the author's RoomScan app is near-moribund. RoomScan Pro, which sells for $4.99, hasn't been updated in over half a year and is listed as "optimized for iPhone 5." It's been mentioned in only two articles indexed by Google News in the last eight months. The Roomscan Twitter account hasn't been updated since November. The free version of the app has been updated more recently, but free in this context isn't exactly going to pay the bills.

These are not the signs of an app that is getting to "twice £X million" anytime soon.

I do think it's an innovative idea and a good implementation, but as we see on HN all too frequently, not all innovative ideas and good implementations amount to a "twice £X million" valuation. Any company (or product) is only worth what the market will pay.

As for Google, I don't know how their corpdev team works, but my rule of thumb after working at some very large companies is: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy. It's not unusual for different teams not to know what the other is doing, even when they should. I don't see anything that justifies speculating about nonexistent employees named Maxine, and that kind of bizarre speculation likely poisoned the discussion.

Whoops.

The right answer would've been to respond to the original message with "If you're serious, make an offer. Otherwise, I intend to continue building this business independently."

Once you get sucked into the conversation you've lost. This is business, not social chit-chat. Know what you're hoping to get out of the conversation and direct it toward getting that; if they won't oblige, end the conversation and don't waste time on it.

/thread

Moving across the ocean with a wife and young child to work for a company under golden handcuffs hardly sounds like an appealing "exit". The OP already mentioned he is not desperate for $ after his first successful startup.

> Instead of the claim of "I can easily get to twice £X million" -- in revenue? profit? valuation? -- it looks like the author's RoomScan app is near-moribund. RoomScan Pro, which sells for $4.99, hasn't been updated in over half a year and is listed as "optimized for iPhone 5." It's been mentioned in only two articles indexed by Google News in the last eight months. The Roomscan Twitter account hasn't been updated since November. The free version of the app has been updated more recently, but free in this context isn't exactly going to pay the bills.

> These are not the signs of an app that is getting to "twice £X million" anytime soon.

Easy to say nearly 10 months on from when this happened. From the article: "By this time, the app is topping both the free and paid charts in its category in many countries, and into the overall top 10 in some." Sounds quite healthy to me. Remember only a short time prior the guy had only 30 sales per day. There may be other metrics that would indicate that this app wasn't going to be a screaming success like his previous one, but his sales and media coverage at the time Google / recruiters got in touch aren't it.

> As for Google, I don't know how their corpdev team works, but my rule of thumb after working at some very large companies is: don't attribute to malice what can be explained by bureaucracy. It's not unusual for different teams not to know what the other is doing, even when they should. I don't see anything that justifies speculating about nonexistent employees named Maxine, and that kind of bizarre speculation likely poisoned the discussion.

For sure. I found it hard to follow his logic here.

> other people reviewed the situation and decided just to offer a generous employment package.

Then why be shady? Why not just say this? Seems very odd to beat around the bush.

"Hey, man. Your app is great and we really like but upon further review we feel like it still needs work. We'd love for you to come work for us and help integrate into product yyy"

^ That seems a hell of a lot more likely to get a bite than basically faking an acquisition.

All right I'll bite. How, exactly, does an engineer make $250-500k a year at Google as an engineer? What examples are there of this happening?

For mid-career (Senior SDE) position it will look like Salary 165k-195k Bonus (15%) 26k Stock grant: 200k-400k over 4 years You will get refreshers so after 2-3 years you may have $100-200k stocks vesting every year.

Salary + bonus + RSUs. It all depends on your grants, perf, etc.

That's pretty broad. What, $150k base for a good engineer then $50k cash bonus and $50k stock? That gets us to the lower end, and it's already way above the upper end of what I've heard. Are we talking about your average engineer in mid-career, or is this 10x 100x rockstar 0.1% could-totally-happen-to-you-though BS?

A level 5 engineer can pull $170-190k base. $30k bonus. Depending on RSU grants and refreshes, you'll can be vesting at least $100k per year. That puts you over $300k total compensation. Combined with benefits and perks, as well as good culture, you can imagine it's pretty hard to convince yourself to go elsewhere.

250k is way above the upper end of what you've heard? I knew a guy who was at $200k at one of the usual suspects straight out of undergrad. It's easy for me to imagine twice that for people with more of a track record.

I've seen interns regularly get offered full-time positions with 100-120k base + 100k RSUs. It's not at all unusual.

Ive had an intern of another company (the one I worked for) and he got offered exactly that (and he got hired, the guy aint crazy - its an awesome first job offer)

Write code, write tests, write docs. Ship product.

Even faster way:

Write code, Ship product, get promoted, tranfer.

$2M for an acquisition on top of an employment offer vs. $1M-$2M in salary and RSU's are vastly different in value.

The acquisition pathway with your numbers would be 2-3 times the value before you discount the present value of the salary and RSU's because of the additional risks associated (even assuming the acquisition amount would be similarly restricted and spread out over time). It seems like you assume that an acqui-hire would mean he'd sell and then not get a salary for four years.

Yes, they're not exactly equivalent, on the other hand, you won't necessarily end up with the same salary and RSUs through an acquisition either. They're not going to acquire you for $2M plus give you an additional $200k vesting RSUs per year.

Point being, there's nothing scammy about a deal being negotiated down, or falling through, and ending up as an employment offer instead of an acquisition, especially if they're only interested in the person, not the company, an acquisition is really just the 'shut down' cost of your business.

Deals fall through all the time and valuations can get reduced once due diligence is done. A business which looks great from the outside can look much less interesting later. And of course, during talks, the other side -- who are usually interested in investing in people -- could become less impressed with you.

> They're not going to acquire you for $2M plus give you an additional $200k vesting RSUs per year.

If that is the case the hypothetical offer (that never was) starts approaching insultingly deceptive given the way they went about it.

If I started talking to someone about an acqui-hire and they expect to get a "discount" on salary and options/RSUs based on the acquisition price, then the acquisition price is artificially inflated to get my interest unless the hinted at acquisition amount makes the salary and RSUs a rounding error (in which case they'd be idiots to potentially antagonise a desirable hire over it). And I'd be tempted to tell them to fuck off just on principle.

Of course Google is not obliged to make him a good offer. But they ought to realise the damage these kind of approaches are doing to their brand amongst potential hires. For my part, while I've never experienced anything like in this article from Google, my experiences with (half a dozen plus) Google recruiters have been entirely negative whenever they've approached me, to the point where I recount my history with past Google recruiters every time a new one calls to make it clear to them why I am going to be short with them until/unless they prove they're worth my time. No other company's has been as disrespectful of my time.

> Point being, there's nothing scammy about a deal being negotiated down

But there is plenty scammy about not making it clear that they are trying to hire him but instead giving the impression they are after his product.

The scam aspect has nothing to do with the valuations or how much the author's startup is actually worth, or whether the deal 'fell through'.

It's the blatant dishonesty of the Googlers making the approach that is inexcusable.

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