I'm willing to bet there is a good chance that if all of those employees went through standard Google hiring channels, not a single one would make it through in

I'm willing to bet there is a good chance that if all of those employees went through standard Google hiring channels, not a single one would make it through in their first try. For a company that takes pride in hiring engineers who more often than not fail the hiring process at least once before eventually getting hired, it's a bit far fetched to assume that Google would not do anything un-Googley and would still end up hiring a non-zero fraction of a company they just acquired based purely on that company's outward success in their favorite arenas (mobile, app-downloads, capital-raising, AI, etc) that have nothing to do with technical performance in 45-minute chunks of time. As someone who failed the process more than once and has read about and is familiar with the process and the arguments surrounding it on both sides, feed me the mantra that Google is coveted enough to afford to fail smart people in interviews (a common response to the potentially false positive rejections). But don't insult my intelligence by claiming that if Google liked and acquired a successful startup, there was absolutely zero change in the interview process before 10%-30% of the staff was hired.