5 ms·

Funny how the startup scene changes. Years ago, Paul Graham wrote essays like 'You weren't meant to have a boss'. Nowadays talent aquisitions are seen as huge s

by nadam 15y ago

Funny how the startup scene changes. Years ago, Paul Graham wrote essays like 'You weren't meant to have a boss'. Nowadays talent aquisitions are seen as huge successes while (money aside) we are celebrating that some former founders found jobs at big companies. (I am also more pragmatic in this question than years ago, so I am not criticizing anyone.)

badclient 15y ago
Nowdays talent acquisitions are seen as huge successes Citation needed.
- AlecSchueler 15y ago
  See: the congratulations that are invariably offered in threads like these.
  - badclient 15y ago
    Sorry if its just me but I always thought that if you've spent some time around HN, you can tell between talent acquisitions that occur out of need(other option being going dead) and talent acquisitions that occur from a position of power(ie. friendfeed). In the former case, congratulations are still in order for the founders not coming out completely empty handed, but I would not term it as "huge successes". Congratulations != huge success(in the big picture sense)
timxpp 15y ago
True. If they would go and work for IBM, would it still sound so good? How come getting a job at Google is seen as a small Nobel price?
rdl 15y ago
I'd draw a distinction between talent acquisitions to go join the general pool of people at a big company, and talent acquisitions to work on the big new focus of a "sleeping giant", in something similar to what you were doing before.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  Wasn't Etherpad the latter, and then they found out that big new focus had been canceled and quit? Same with Dodgeball, Aardvark, Jaiku, Jotspot, and any number of other acquisitions. You shouldn't assume anything about what your job duties will be in a big company, even if it's written into your contract. Big companies have an internal logic that often makes no sense to the outside world, and usually depends upon what the decision makers are paying attention to at the moment. Priorities change.
  - rdl 15y ago
    Other than YouTube and Android, nothing Google has set out to do approaches how seriously they are taking Google+. Bigger than gmail, definitely (which, for acq, is tied to o Grand Central I think) Wave had its own issues, mainly due to being political and inviolate, from what has been written outside google. It was really sad to see etherpad get caught up in that.
pg 15y ago
(money aside) That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.
- nostrademons 15y ago
  I'm curious what the average founder's take is in a talent acquisition. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html http://ycombinator.com/nums.html indicates that 80% of YC's acquisitions have been for <$10M - so does that work out to about $1-2M per founder, after investors and employees get their cut? Not chump change by any means, but skilled engineers in Silicon Valley can easily make $250K/year in total compensation. If a startup takes about 3 years of ramen wages to come to fruition and then the founders are locked up for another year while they vest, the plain old employee will have made about $1M in the time that the startup founder made maybe $2.5M. Startup founder is still ahead, but they took on all the risk of their startup failing and them getting nothing, and the difference is only about a factor of 2 instead of an order of magnitude.
  - akkartik 15y ago
    I tend to think of offers in terms of how long I can live on the savings from a single year. If you make 100k and save 20k, you make 200k and save 120k[1]. It's not 2x but 6x. [1] I'm not considering taxes and so on, but the basic idea of leverage still applies.
    - nostrademons 15y ago
      That's a fair way of looking at it, but again, you need to compare equivalent lifestyles. If a startup founder lives on $30K/year because they were constrained to that for the 3 years they were growing their startup, you should compare that to an employee also living on $30K/year. In both cases, their expenses are negligible compared to their income. The employee banks about 7 years for every year he works (modulo taxes, which are not insignificant), while the startup founder banks nothing for the first 3 years and then banks 60-70 years in the final year.
  - 15y ago
revorad 15y ago
Years ago, PG also wrote "Hiring is obsolete" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html
hristov 15y ago
I never really understood talent acquisitions. They are still puzzling to me. If you only need the talent why pay for the company? A huge chunk of the money you are paying for a company goes to the investors. Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service? I don't know, I must be missing something.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago
  Perhaps your puzzlement comes from a lack of exposure to all the variables? Not being critical here, I don't know anything about your background. For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible. You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you. But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it. Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead. You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off. The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.

by nadam 15y ago

badclient 15y ago

Nowdays talent acquisitions are seen as huge successes Citation needed.

AlecSchueler 15y ago
See: the congratulations that are invariably offered in threads like these.
- badclient 15y ago
  Sorry if its just me but I always thought that if you've spent some time around HN, you can tell between talent acquisitions that occur out of need(other option being going dead) and talent acquisitions that occur from a position of power(ie. friendfeed). In the former case, congratulations are still in order for the founders not coming out completely empty handed, but I would not term it as "huge successes". Congratulations != huge success(in the big picture sense)

timxpp 15y ago

True. If they would go and work for IBM, would it still sound so good? How come getting a job at Google is seen as a small Nobel price?

rdl 15y ago

I'd draw a distinction between talent acquisitions to go join the general pool of people at a big company, and talent acquisitions to work on the big new focus of a "sleeping giant", in something similar to what you were doing before.

nostrademons 15y ago
Wasn't Etherpad the latter, and then they found out that big new focus had been canceled and quit? Same with Dodgeball, Aardvark, Jaiku, Jotspot, and any number of other acquisitions. You shouldn't assume anything about what your job duties will be in a big company, even if it's written into your contract. Big companies have an internal logic that often makes no sense to the outside world, and usually depends upon what the decision makers are paying attention to at the moment. Priorities change.
- rdl 15y ago
  Other than YouTube and Android, nothing Google has set out to do approaches how seriously they are taking Google+. Bigger than gmail, definitely (which, for acq, is tied to o Grand Central I think) Wave had its own issues, mainly due to being political and inviolate, from what has been written outside google. It was really sad to see etherpad get caught up in that.

pg 15y ago

(money aside) That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.

nostrademons 15y ago
I'm curious what the average founder's take is in a talent acquisition. http://ycombinator.com/nums.html http://ycombinator.com/nums.html indicates that 80% of YC's acquisitions have been for <$10M - so does that work out to about $1-2M per founder, after investors and employees get their cut? Not chump change by any means, but skilled engineers in Silicon Valley can easily make $250K/year in total compensation. If a startup takes about 3 years of ramen wages to come to fruition and then the founders are locked up for another year while they vest, the plain old employee will have made about $1M in the time that the startup founder made maybe $2.5M. Startup founder is still ahead, but they took on all the risk of their startup failing and them getting nothing, and the difference is only about a factor of 2 instead of an order of magnitude.
- akkartik 15y ago
  I tend to think of offers in terms of how long I can live on the savings from a single year. If you make 100k and save 20k, you make 200k and save 120k[1]. It's not 2x but 6x. [1] I'm not considering taxes and so on, but the basic idea of leverage still applies.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    That's a fair way of looking at it, but again, you need to compare equivalent lifestyles. If a startup founder lives on $30K/year because they were constrained to that for the 3 years they were growing their startup, you should compare that to an employee also living on $30K/year. In both cases, their expenses are negligible compared to their income. The employee banks about 7 years for every year he works (modulo taxes, which are not insignificant), while the startup founder banks nothing for the first 3 years and then banks 60-70 years in the final year.
- 15y ago

revorad 15y ago

Years ago, PG also wrote "Hiring is obsolete" - http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hiring.html

hristov 15y ago

I never really understood talent acquisitions. They are still puzzling to me. If you only need the talent why pay for the company? A huge chunk of the money you are paying for a company goes to the investors. Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service? I don't know, I must be missing something.

ChuckMcM 15y ago
Perhaps your puzzlement comes from a lack of exposure to all the variables? Not being critical here, I don't know anything about your background. For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible. You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you. But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it. Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead. You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off. The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.