4 ms·

The right person is. How much was Steve Jobs worth to Apple? Bret is one of the most outrageously talented and productive people I've ever worked with. In a hi

• segmondy 10y ago
  Why not just hire him directly? Hey, come work for us. Here, salary of $20/mil a year, guaranteed for the next 5 years.
  • huac 10y ago
    Theoretically, as the CEO of Quip, he has some interest in helping his coworkers cash out too.
  • pb 10y ago
    Obviously the rest of the team is likely to be very talented as well. Also, he's the founder, which includes a responsibility to act in the best interest of the company (plus $20M/yr would be much less money).
    • zaidf 10y ago
      Also, someone like Bret is very unlikely to be attracted by purely monetary gain like a $20/mil year salary(or even $50/mil year.) He probably cares as much, if not more, in being able to achieve some larger goal--which requires building a sort of team he has already built.
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  • duaneb 10y ago
    Nothing like abandoning a company you built right as it hits its stride.
• kennywinker 10y ago
  That's a good question. When Steve came back to Apple through the NeXT acquisition, he didn't come alone. He brought a team of smart devs, and a pretty awesome technology stack (Foundation, AppKit, Objective C). Now Steve was obviously the lynchpin and you probably couldn't have gotten one without the other, but I wonder hypothetically what the value of those things separated would have been. Steve alone, or team+ip alone. I suspect neither one would have been as valuable as both together.
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• dkarapetyan 10y ago
  What size company is Quip? What size company is Salesforce? It doesn't matter how productive you are, how smart you are, or how "anything" you are. You can't beat the bell curve. What matters in the grand scheme of things is how good everyone else around you is. I've never seen smart/productive people last at large companies. The bozo/non-bozo ratio is always too high at big companies.
  • blahi 10y ago
    Yeah. Large companies are lead by idiots. That's why they are so large.
    • adventured 10y ago
      No, they got large because they weren't previously lead by idiots. Then they get large and then they rot. History is littered with endless examples: HP, IBM, GM, Kodak, Sony, Xerox, Sears, Pan Am, US Steel, Nokia. Some of them collapsed entirely, some still struggle on, some recovered only to rot again. It's rare that mega corps don't go through some variation of a rot cycle due to the accumulation of poor leaders at the top once they get large enough and far enough away from the original vision and leadership that got them to the top.
      • blahi 10y ago
        You are oversimplifying this to the point where your conclusion is almost completely wrong. There are many factors which contribute to the decline of companies. For example there was an article about Kodak on HN and why it failed. The inertia was too strong in that case. Differences in goals and objectives is another very popular reason. I understand it's tempting to think your bosses are morons but they rarely are.
        • dkarapetyan 10y ago
          So if Kodak leadership was full of geniuses how come it failed? Companies often get large not because of leadership but because they happen to be at the right place at the right time with the right idea. Plenty of people have the right idea but they rarely happen to be at the right place and time.
• tmalsburg2 10y ago
  In hindsight Steve Jobs was worth billions but that was not clear at all at the time he was (re-)hired. Many super bright and previously successful people have failed in their new positions. When you price that risk in, $750M hardly seem like a great deal.