Google Hires Tech Team from Homejoy, Readies Leap into Home Services
recode.net
recode.net
(1) Google is hiring a portion of Homejoy's staff (sourced to Google)
(2) Homejoy's current platform will be shuttered (sourced to completely unspecific "sources", but this is pretty explicit in Homejoy's own public shutdown announcement.)
(3) Google "had set out to enter" the home services space "earlier this year" (sourced to a Buzzfeed article, which actually claimed that Google was in the process of readying an offering in the space, that doesn't indicate the timing of the planned launch, so really doesn't support the past-intention characterization given in the Re/Code article.)
So, Homejoy is shutting down (which we knew), Google has hired some of Homejoy's technical staff, and there were reports a few months back that Google might be readying some product in a space related to (but not identical to) what Homejoy was doing.
Edit in reply to edit
It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension her team, would therefore have made a number of high-level contacts inside Google.
That said, if they are speaking to sources then they should reference them (even if anonymously.) Otherwise, as you noted, we can only consider it an opinion piece masquerading as journalism.
I see nothing in that ethics statement that contradicts the GP's assertion which was:
It's not unreasonable that Kara, and by extension
her team, would therefore have made a number of
high-level contacts inside GoogleYou mean someone like Google Ventures?
Since your concern appears to be "how can I make employees the slaves of investors?", that's no bad thing.
Corporate VCs are effectively a way for cash rich corporations to buy call options on promising and/or potentially disruptive teams and technologies and keep close tabs on what is happening and how things are progressing. I can't think of a situation where corporate VC was a markedly better outcome for a startup or entrepreneur than a traditional financial VC.
EDIT: Hand remaining money back to VC, say "We've received better job offers", turn off the lights and move on.
The principals might have enforceable contracts which they would be breaking by doing so; most employees -- and this is about a subset of the technical staff -- would, however, be free to leave at any time.
Can you truly force someone to work for you though, legally? I don't believe so, other than preventing the principal from receiving some sort of future-promised compensation (bonus, etc) or having a compensation clawback (which, I would think, would be extremely difficult to enforce).
Can you force them? Generally, no.
Can they be substantially penalized for failing to honor contract terms, potentially beyond merely returning any unused leftovers of what they received in exchange for their promises? Yes.
That's what I'm interested in. What could these consequences be?
(depends on the type of IP though, but you better have a really solid claim)
If this was a contributing factor to Homejoy going belly-up, rather than a consequence of the shutdown decision, they'd probably be unhappy with it, not that there is anything they could likely do. The technical staff aren't property which belongs to the company or its VC investors.
The extent to which the equity-holders can reasonably expect money is the extent to which the company-held IP is valuable in and of itself (or, to a lesser extent, valuable when combined with the expertise you get by hiring the team).
Perhaps they should have done more due diligence? When you invest in a company there is always a risk something like this will happen. The question is: why would you invest in a company that can't survive without constant funding injections? It seems like a house of cards that suddenly fell down when the investors stopped propping it up.
Google didn't do anything wrong. The company folded and they hired some of the employees. It sucks for the investors, but that's life.
I guess if they could get $1 from investors why not a $100 million. I would have loved to see what was in their pitch deck as I can’t imagine a worse industry to try and build a unicorn.
Mobile, on demand services. So hot right now.
Is there no money being returned to the investors via a sell? 40M is a lot of dough... GV can write it off with the acqui-hiring, but what about the others, specially First Round?
I feel like the story behind Homejoy would make a great series of blogposts
It's kind of annoying, but hell, Google failed at "Home Services" at least once before, why not hire a couple people who failed at exactly that just a few days ago. It sounds like a winning only-makes-sense-to-google kind of strategy.
In this case, I'm hoping they're just hiring technical people and not looking at cleaning houses, but it always brings that fictional megacorp to mind and makes me uncomfortable.
I know that the two entities are distinct, so I guess this is Kosher?
Maybe because they are proven capable to deliver technology team, which Google has many ways to employ, that was about to be unemployed en masse given that Homejoy was suspending operations and thus likely wasn't going to have much for them to do, or anything with which to pay them.
> Home services seems like the sort of thing that absolutely demands a solid customer service and sales organization.
If Google, as was reported months ago, is well on its way to offering its own product in this market than, whether or not Homejoy's tech team was (as is claimed, without any stated basis or source, in the Re/Code article) hired to work on it, its likely that the customer service and sales structure for it is already decided. If the model isn't fundamentally what Homejoy was doing, there's not necessarily any reason to think that Homejoy's team in that area would be of any use to Google's product.
OTOH, whether on a home services product or otherwise, Google probably can find lots of uses for engineering talent.
Perhaps they are paying a little premium on hiring themselves to get a single team started and working on something very quickly?
I remember hearing that Google can't aggressively promote their own services in search results. (Example: When I google "search", the top 4 hits are Yahoo, search.com, AOL, & DuckDuckGo.)
Is this a proactive measure on their part to keep anti-trust regulation at bay, or an established prohibited practice? In the latter case, is there any guidance around where 'the line' is regarding this behavior?