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I think a side-lesson from this article is how difficult acquisitions/enterprise sales are in general. When you are working with a huge organization like Google

I think a side-lesson from this article is how difficult acquisitions/enterprise sales are in general. When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it. I think Chan was perhaps right for Google to not buy Skype, but it's a good lesson when you are trying to get Google to buy your startup. Or even if you are trying to get a big company to license your technology or be a customer. Find your benefactors and detractors and manage both to win deals you want.

tokenadult 15y ago
When you are working with a huge organization like Google you really need to identify the few key people in favor of your deal and who are trying to scuttle it. More generally, this is known in economics as the agency problem of the firm. (I Googled for some handy references, but I'll let readers who are interested seek out the references that best fit their own background, as I wasn't completely satisfied with any of the links I found.) Employees of companies are naturally looking out for their own individual interests, as well as (the company's shareholders hope) the higher good of the company. Setting up company policies to provide incentives for shareholder-value-maximizing decisions is not easy, especially when many of those decisions involve predictions of an uncertain future, in which outcomes for individuals may differ from the outcome for the company.