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I think you're hitting the real divide here. Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even w

• benreesman 1y ago
  Yeah I think you're right. It's a sad commentary on the times when a group of people so far above average in caring about outcomes and data just go completely lizard brain in a way that comes out of their own paychecks.
• scarface_74 1y ago
  So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
  • jbothma 1y ago
    Any evidence of that?
    • benreesman 1y ago
      Probably talking about character.ai and a few similar cases. It's not the trend GP is making it out to be.
      • JustExAWS 1y ago
        People in government think otherwise https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-talent-00167968 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
    • JustExAWS 1y ago
      Google and Windsurf https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how-windsurfs-vcs-and-founders-got-paid-from-the-google-deal/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how... Amazon https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-talent-00167968 https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-... Microsoft and Inflection https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150707208.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150... Microsoft almost pulled it off with OpenAI during the Altman fiasco.
      • benreesman 1y ago
        Listen, I think its bullshit what happened to the Windsurf people. And I'm happy that the Figma people didnt get crammed down with some scam ass preference assplay. But blaming Lina Khan for the crime orgy that started the minute she was forced out is silly. Go stick that blade where it belongs. I'll help any way I can. https://youtu.be/pDaELkYEC_g https://youtu.be/pDaELkYEC_g
        • scarface_74 1y ago
          I’m sure the employees who Google hired don’t feel at all “crammed”. The only reason they took this route instead of an acquisition is because of the current regulator environment. But the current VP was a huge fan of Khan.
      • trhway 1y ago
        >Google and Windsurf >https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how-windsurfs-vcs-and-founders-got-paid-from-the-google-deal/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how... that looks strange to me to say the least - a company A's leadership leases completely away the company A's IP to a company B while at the same time getting fat employment offers from the same company B. If it were in Russia i'd say it is a bribe/kickback while in US it looks suspiciously like a huge conflict of interests. How no regulatory agency looked into that...
        • JustExAWS 1y ago
  • benreesman 1y ago
    A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs. This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!
    • ethbr1 1y ago
      The under appreciated drag is which is statistically more likely to be talented? 1. Someone from a wealthy / connected family 2. Someone who scrambled to the top of 100,000 other people Folks can argue good schools, etc. all they want, but proven ability and drive to outcompete others should be a heavy counter argument against nepotism of all sorts.
  • triceratops 1y ago
    If it keeps up, it's only a matter of time before startups stop being able to hire top talent.
    • JustExAWS 1y ago
      Most startup hiring has always been a scam for the idealistic where people would be better off statistically by just working for a publicly traded tech company that put RSUs in your brokerage account that you could immediately sell (and should) diversify once you are vested. In my latter years of my career, I’ve been offered “great opportunities” at a startup that paid less in cash for more responsibilities than I was making as a mid level employee (cash + RSUs) at BigTech when I was there. Of course they promised “equity” that was illiquid and probably would have been worthless.
  • assword 1y ago
    > So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self I thought they were dumping everyone at the moment. Unless you’re an AI researcher.
    • scarface_74 1y ago
      And notice who gets hired… That means if there are 10 developer - 7 working on the product and 3 working on the fundamental AI problem, those 7 aren’t going to be left (the company didn’t want the product anyway) and the 3 researchers are going to be hired. Something similar happened with Google and Windsurf. So who benefited from the anti acquisition mood of the previous FTC? Not most of the employees who could have made more just working for a public company in the first place and not even the investors. Google accomplished the same thing with less red tape and didn’t have to hire the people they didn’t want.
  • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    > So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry. If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right? Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.
    • scarface_74 1y ago
      Yes because you don’t like companies being able to pay people more money?
      • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
        Companies get money from workers (i.e. customers), pay some back to workers (employees), and keep the rest as profit (or waste it on some kind of bureaucratic inefficiency). Workers can get more money by either paying less as customers or getting paid more as employees. Monopolies screw them on both ends. Customers pay more because there are fewer suppliers, and then employees make less because there is less competition for hiring which also makes it easier for the large employers to coordinate non-poaching agreements.
        • JustExAWS 1y ago
          The fact is though in this scenario Google paid the employees more and in what tech area is Google a “monopoly”? The fact that Google did “poach” employees means that there wasn’t an agreement not to.
          • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
            In a market where there are only a small handful of incumbents and then a bunch of precarious cash-strapped startups, the incumbents collude with each other so that they only have to outbid the startups. The startups, meanwhile, are at a disadvantage because e.g. the incumbents control search engine rankings or app distribution channels, which lowers their competitiveness and therefore the amount they can afford pay to employees in competition with the incumbents. The incumbents are then the high bidder even while offering something less than they would have had to in the alternative.
• AnthonyMouse 1y ago
  > Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad. You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforcement are themselves externalities and it doesn't do any good to burn $1 in overhead to prevent $0.90 in some other cost. But you want a ban on leaded gasoline. And you need antitrust rules, because "the market is more efficient" is fundamentally predicated on competitive markets. Real competition is the sine qua non of that actually working. Most government inefficiency is because the government is a monopoly, and private monopolies are just as bad. The problem is politics breaks everyone's brains. One party says "regulation good" and the other side says "regulation bad" before either of them considers what the regulation actually does. And then you have one party promoting illiterate nonsense like price controls or justifying busybodies who want to micromanage things they don't even understand or trusting the government with mass surveillance data just because they're not a private company, and on the other side you have people with no objections to tying arrangements or companies with double-digit market share buying even more of their competitors. "Everything should be made as simple as possible but no simpler." That last bit turns out to be kind of important.
  • benreesman 1y ago
    Your whole comment is good but I want to signal boost the most important point you made. Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.
    • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
      > Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient. It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be. Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. What you want is neither of these things.
• akudha 1y ago
  Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention These are people who are ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention? How can such an extreme position even begin to make sense? This is like letting boxers (or MMA fighters) fight in the ring without a referee, isn't it? As it is, there are lax rules that are getting even more relaxed by the day and even those lax rules aren't enforced consistently, for big businesses and those with money.
  • bobthepanda 1y ago
    > big businesses and those with money There are obviously the people in this cohort and there are also the people who think they will be in this cohort, who think they will be the victors in a cartel-like world. Heck, before layoffs and the threat of AI started concentrating even more power into tech leadership there were plenty of tech folks along for the ride as the high paid, in demand workforce benefiting from the above.
    • npunt 1y ago
      Yeah, many people on HN act like temporarily embarrassed monopolists, ala Steinbeck [1] [1] https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d108b7e443d1a44442ad78165b35 https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d...