4 ms·

It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfec

It's still pretty amazing that Y Combinator worked out as well as it did. Like a lot of very successful companies, it seems like the world just fell into perfect alignment with the vision. It's interesting that acqui-hiring (as alluded to in the email) actually became a trend; even though it was later recognized to be bad idea (E.g. Yahoo's acqui-hiring tactics have failed miserably). It seems like there was a false idea that tech talent was extremely precious and limited. It wasn't, but that didn't matter; acqui-hiring still became a thing and companies (and some foolish young founders) still profited from it.

nostrademons 10y ago
Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to get into since the MS-DOS days. I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.
- pilsetnieks 10y ago
  > Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.
tedmiston 10y ago
It's still a great idea. Some companies just paid too much for some teams / products. Eight-figure acquihires are still weird to me.

nostrademons 10y ago

Acqui-hiring was a trend long before YC. Companies have been buying startups because the founding team has expertise in a new technology that they want to get into since the MS-DOS days. I also wouldn't say it's a bad idea, or that tech talent isn't extremely precious & limited. Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. Companies will still pay lots of money for, say, deep learning or drone or self-driving car experts.

pilsetnieks 10y ago
> Rather, people with web programming expertise don't get acqui-hired anymore, because those skills have diffused through the population enough that you can get them easily on the open market. And not necessarily even by hiring anyone - a lot of the stuff that a decade ago you needed a reasonably competent programmer for, have become commoditized in the form of services or even opensource solutions. For example, you needed at least a programmer and a designer to build a website for your company, or had to buy those services from another company. Whereas nowadays you can set up a wordpress site, buy a nice looking template, set up a medium blog, or a shopify store for a few bucks a month. Of course, if you want custom stuff, you have to pay someone to customize it but it no longer requires as much of the knowledge you needed to build a site from scratch.

tedmiston 10y ago

It's still a great idea. Some companies just paid too much for some teams / products. Eight-figure acquihires are still weird to me.