5 ms·

I'm sure a lot of people are resentful or disgusted that a 17-year-old was acquired for $30 million. I just find it fucking hilarious. It's awesome, not in some

I'm sure a lot of people are resentful or disgusted that a 17-year-old was acquired for $30 million. I just find it fucking hilarious. It's awesome, not in some dipshit "American Dream" sort of way, but in the "holy shit, this world is on crack" sense of it. I say, go him! The next time I am looking for work I am seriously considering getting rid of the resume and coming up with a bullshit startup name. It's pretty ridiculous that my "acq-hire" value in a startup with a bullshit product would be about 50 times the market salary for someone at my level of skill. (I've seen enough inside numbers to know that this is not an exaggeration. Acq-hire values are $2-4M for mediocre engineers and $4-10M for good ones.) One could do major social-proof arbitrage by offering cuts (of future acq-hires) to people in the tech press. I am dead-fucking-sure this is already happening. It must be. The stakes are too high, and the players too degenerate. On to the main point: yeah, it is terrifying that large corporate cultures are that desperate for innovation. I feel like they suffer the same problem as command economies. The natural information-theoretic incompetence of central authorities makes them slow to respond to anything (including especially their own creeping obsolescence, for which they compensate by purchasing external talent at extreme prices) but overreactive once they do.

muzz 14y ago
Did you read the article? In paragraph 4 he specifically tells us he takes the founders age off the table.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I know that the OP did take it off the table. I'm not doing so. It's important, and here's why. I'm sure he's extremely talented. Most 17-year-olds aren't programming at all. However, this is an HR acquisition (they're shutting Summly down). What exactly does a 17-year-old have that merits a $30m hiring bonus? I'm not ragging on him, at all. I think it's great for him. He had the opportunity and took it. That's awesome. But... what are Yahoo's executives thinking? When DE Shaw hires Putnam Fellows, they start them at $150-200k. Not $30 million. They have to work their way up to that. I'm not asking this out of resentment, because I don't care. Yahoo could have acquired him for $500m and I wouldn't care. I'm asking that out of honest curiosity. If you're that desperate for talent that you're hiring 17-year-olds (very good 17-year-olds, no doubt) with a $30m hiring bonus instead of a much more reasonable, I don't know, $500k, then what did you do so wrong as to get there? See, I'm sure there are economic reasons for large companies to buy goofy startups for $7 million per engineer. But that's a sign that either (a) they're all seriously underpaying their people, and it's systemic across the Valley, or (b) their internal cultures are so stifling of creativity that they're desperate for innovation, and the only thing they can come up with is to massively overpay "credible" people from the outside instead of developing internal talent. I suspect that it's both (a) and (b). In fact, I've been inside enough short-sighted, badly-run companies to know that it is. It's of personal interest to me. Companies are literally in headline-making death throes because they can't get people like me, and when one of us shows up-- we aren't that rare, maybe 1 in ~100 software engineers-- they treat us like shit. It's bizarre. Here's a proposal to all the large corporations out there. For a mere $2500 per hour I, Michael O. Church, will tell you how to unfuck your inefficient, talent-stifling culture. CEO of a megalith that can't hire good people without a 5-million-per-engineer acq-hire? (Actually, you probably have good people-- some much better than I am-- but the dopey middle managers keep you from seeing their talents. Fire them. That'll be $175.) I will help you change that. All you have to do is listen to me. After 200 hours (that's a mere $500k) you will no longer to acq-hire at $5-10m per engineer to get good teams. You'll be able to do it for $3m per engineer because people will actually want to work for you. Or, better yet, you'll be able to get good people the old-fashioned way. Mark Zuckerberg is young and rich, but he actually built a free-standing company. So it's not as ridiculous that he's worth billions, given that the work (possibly not the code, but the ongoing business process) is still in use.
  - photorized 14y ago
    This "strange" deal actually did a few things for Yahoo: - people are talking about it (and not in a bad way, like it was with the telecommuting memo) - this may attract some fresh talent (just out of novelty; before, Yahoo was pretty much written off) - it's crazy enough, it's actually pretty energizing for the right kind of people on the inside On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo.
    - michaelochurch 14y ago
      People are talking about it in a bad way. I don't think it's useful to hate or resent a 17-year-old for getting acq-hired (although it's pretty disgusting that he keeps the company of Mark Pincus and Rupert Murdoch; I'll give him till 21 to clean his judgment of character of such) but this reflects really badly on Yahoo. On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo. Well, for fuck's sake yeah. What Yahoo needs to do, and fast, is get better at discovering talent within. Apparently they have a problem with lazy people. Ok, so make it possible for a not-lazy employee to make a real dent-- important projects, self-direction, lots of autonomy. Give your best people an incentive to bring themselves out and shine. Honestly, if you give your most talented people basic support and autonomy instead of letting them get eaten alive by people they intimidate, you're doing better than 90+ percent of companies.
      - tlogan 14y ago
        Any attempt to innovate in corporation is potential career killer. That is how companies work. So many smart engineers are just quiet and they just do what they are told (make they boss happy).
        Swannie 14y ago
        Absolutely, pure innovators dilemma. Seems Yahoo! tried to solve this with their "brickhouse" program, a new product incubator, but ultimately it seems that was too disruptive and got axed.
robomartin 14y ago
I am going to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt. I have a hard time believing that they'd pay $30M to gain five programmers. There's a lot more to this than we are aware of. C'mon folks, if you think the math doesn't add-up (as an acqui-hire) don't you think the folks at Yahoo can do basic arithmetic as well. I've also read a few posts on this thread saying as much as "there are no smart people at Yahoo" or "everyone at Yahoo is an idiot" (paraphrasing). Coming from folks at HN I think these kinds of statements are really unbecoming. Of course there are a lot of amazing people at Yahoo. Tons of them. Here's a bit of news for detractors: Business is hard. No, it is fucking hard. And, at their size and scale it is even harder. And, at the break-neck competitive speed of the internet, even harder still. Mere humans make mistakes. We can read the tea-leaves wrong and take the wrong road --or one that is less than ideal. In business this can cost you years before you regain your prior position. What matters is that you do not give up. I like Yahoo very much. They've been around for a long time and hopefully they'll be around a lot longer. They might eventually find a groove to fall into and light-up the afterburners. Stupid they are not. What they are doing is hard. What all of us are doing is hard, at any scale.
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I have a hard time believing that they'd pay $30M to gain five programmers. That's a fairly standard acq-hire, actually. It's not just Yahoo that's paying over $5 million per head. It's ridiculous, when you consider that the value of an employment relationship (which can be ended by either party at any time) is set at 30-60 times the annual salary. (Just think about it: how is a relationship that lasts 4.5 years on average worth 50x salary?) As I said, either engineers are getting screwed, or acq-hires are signs of severe desperation and devastating information poverty. It seems to be both. I've also read a few posts on this thread saying as much as "there are no smart people at Yahoo" or "everyone at Yahoo is an idiot" (paraphrasing). Coming from folks at HN I think these kinds of statements are really unbecoming. Of course there are a lot of amazing people at Yahoo. Tons of them. I am dead sure that there are a lot of amazing engineers at Yahoo. It's just sad that the company is so calamitously bad at recognizing talent at the bottom that it has to hire external 17-year-olds. I'm sure they have plenty of great people who'd be thrilled to do an NLP/R&D project for just their regular salary. If I were at Yahoo right now, after this acq-hire I'd write Marissa Mayer an email: Dear Marissa, Hi, I'm Michael O. Church. My salary is now $500,000 and I have full autonomy to work on whatever project I want. Based on the rate you are paying for external talent, this salary is justified. I am dead sure I will deliver more economic value to Yahoo than I take from it, but I will choose my projects from here on out. If that is not acceptable to you, Friday is my last day. If you're writing $30-million acq-hire checks for 17-year-olds, you should fire every goddamn middle manager, because your ability to recognize talent at the bottom is for shit.
MortenK 14y ago
If it's that easy why don't you do it? Surely a self-proclaimed 1 in a 100 programmer could bang out a product ripe for aquihire in the time it took to write all these "don't care, but still" posts?
- michaelochurch 14y ago
  I never said that it's easy. We both know that it's not "easy" to get acq-hired for $30 million. It's also not easy to win the Powerball, even if any idiot has a chance. It is, however, a sign of something wrong in the economy. When a $6-million-per-engineer acq-hire (the team, not the product, is being bought) is going down, the company is paying about 50 years of an engineer's salary for an employment relationship. A job lasts, on average, 4.4 years according to BLS. Particulars to acq-hires only make that expected duration lower, but let's use 4.4 because we don't know what the "real number" here is. Executives bitch until they're blue in the face about paying 25% for a normal recruiter. It seems inconsistent to complain that your headhunter's charging you 25%, then pay 5000% for an HR acquisition. This means one of two things. The first is that, possibly, the employment relationship is worth that much. That is, it's worth $1.5 million per year (as opposed to the more typically cited figures, which are around $200,000) to employ an engineer. Well, then engineers are getting screwed. They're only getting ~7% of their total value-add (120k / 1620k) instead of 38% (120k / 320k). The second possibility is that engineers aren't getting screwed, but that companies are so bad at discovering talent internally that the only way the executives and get their hands on someone good is to buy people on the market at a very high price. That's not saying that there aren't good people at a company like Yahoo; only that the middle-management filter is so dysfunctional that executives don't know what they have. Let's say that in November, you pay $2000, out of desperation, for a new coat that's worth $175. When your lease ends in August and you're cleaning everything out, you find that you had an equally good coat in your apartment, just sitting there all winter. You couldn't spot it before because the place was such a pigsty. You'd feel like an idiot, then, wouldn't you? That's how executives deserve to feel if they acq-hire talent for $6 million but have capable people within (and I'm sure they must have some) who are being underutilized on trivial features and fourth-quadrant nonsense. If you simply don't have talent, then go ahead and buy it at a high price. If you have it and can't find or use it, then you need to scorched-earth your whole management structure.
blablabla123 14y ago
Haters gonna hate. When you were 17, did you have the opportunity to do such a thing? No, this is why you are jealous. It's thing to celebrate.
- csmattryder 14y ago
  It's not the fact he's 17. There are 25 year olds in startups, as recently as yesterday's Demo Day at YC, who've been given multi-million dollar investment and acquisition offers. It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less. But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand.
  - blablabla123 14y ago
    >It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less. Ok, I think get your point. Still I have to disagree. The thing is this, many successful ideas don't need lots of genuine innovation and creativity. Instead they need to be 1. realized, 2. at the right time and 3. targetted towards the right people. IMHO Facebook is a prime example for this. When you look at the history of communities, Facebook was by no means innovative. There have been plenty communities already and the world of communities progressed towards continuous improvements. In fact I used to be a vivid user of many Web 1.0 communities and watched with great excitement the transition from tech-people dominated communities towards general audience communities. Why did Yahoo not create Facebook? Well, it's the same reason small startups can drive big elephants out of business. I think there have been enough posts about this thing on HN in the past. >But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand. 1. The authors did put a lot of time in it (yes, multiple people worked on that, check out the website's About) 2. A great number of users are using it 3. Yahoo is not the only company interested in taking over a working website. Market mechanics.
7952 14y ago
In large corporations new hires and acquisitions are handled by different teams. Both teams may be working for the same set of goals, but in ways that are often conflicting in a practical sense.

muzz 14y ago

Did you read the article? In paragraph 4 he specifically tells us he takes the founders age off the table.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I know that the OP did take it off the table. I'm not doing so. It's important, and here's why. I'm sure he's extremely talented. Most 17-year-olds aren't programming at all. However, this is an HR acquisition (they're shutting Summly down). What exactly does a 17-year-old have that merits a $30m hiring bonus? I'm not ragging on him, at all. I think it's great for him. He had the opportunity and took it. That's awesome. But... what are Yahoo's executives thinking? When DE Shaw hires Putnam Fellows, they start them at $150-200k. Not $30 million. They have to work their way up to that. I'm not asking this out of resentment, because I don't care. Yahoo could have acquired him for $500m and I wouldn't care. I'm asking that out of honest curiosity. If you're that desperate for talent that you're hiring 17-year-olds (very good 17-year-olds, no doubt) with a $30m hiring bonus instead of a much more reasonable, I don't know, $500k, then what did you do so wrong as to get there? See, I'm sure there are economic reasons for large companies to buy goofy startups for $7 million per engineer. But that's a sign that either (a) they're all seriously underpaying their people, and it's systemic across the Valley, or (b) their internal cultures are so stifling of creativity that they're desperate for innovation, and the only thing they can come up with is to massively overpay "credible" people from the outside instead of developing internal talent. I suspect that it's both (a) and (b). In fact, I've been inside enough short-sighted, badly-run companies to know that it is. It's of personal interest to me. Companies are literally in headline-making death throes because they can't get people like me, and when one of us shows up-- we aren't that rare, maybe 1 in ~100 software engineers-- they treat us like shit. It's bizarre. Here's a proposal to all the large corporations out there. For a mere $2500 per hour I, Michael O. Church, will tell you how to unfuck your inefficient, talent-stifling culture. CEO of a megalith that can't hire good people without a 5-million-per-engineer acq-hire? (Actually, you probably have good people-- some much better than I am-- but the dopey middle managers keep you from seeing their talents. Fire them. That'll be $175.) I will help you change that. All you have to do is listen to me. After 200 hours (that's a mere $500k) you will no longer to acq-hire at $5-10m per engineer to get good teams. You'll be able to do it for $3m per engineer because people will actually want to work for you. Or, better yet, you'll be able to get good people the old-fashioned way. Mark Zuckerberg is young and rich, but he actually built a free-standing company. So it's not as ridiculous that he's worth billions, given that the work (possibly not the code, but the ongoing business process) is still in use.
- photorized 14y ago
  This "strange" deal actually did a few things for Yahoo: - people are talking about it (and not in a bad way, like it was with the telecommuting memo) - this may attract some fresh talent (just out of novelty; before, Yahoo was pretty much written off) - it's crazy enough, it's actually pretty energizing for the right kind of people on the inside On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo.
  - michaelochurch 14y ago
    People are talking about it in a bad way. I don't think it's useful to hate or resent a 17-year-old for getting acq-hired (although it's pretty disgusting that he keeps the company of Mark Pincus and Rupert Murdoch; I'll give him till 21 to clean his judgment of character of such) but this reflects really badly on Yahoo. On the other hand, I can only imagine what kind of internal HR issues these acqui-hires may create for Yahoo. Well, for fuck's sake yeah. What Yahoo needs to do, and fast, is get better at discovering talent within. Apparently they have a problem with lazy people. Ok, so make it possible for a not-lazy employee to make a real dent-- important projects, self-direction, lots of autonomy. Give your best people an incentive to bring themselves out and shine. Honestly, if you give your most talented people basic support and autonomy instead of letting them get eaten alive by people they intimidate, you're doing better than 90+ percent of companies.
    - tlogan 14y ago
      Any attempt to innovate in corporation is potential career killer. That is how companies work. So many smart engineers are just quiet and they just do what they are told (make they boss happy).
      - Swannie 14y ago
        Absolutely, pure innovators dilemma. Seems Yahoo! tried to solve this with their "brickhouse" program, a new product incubator, but ultimately it seems that was too disruptive and got axed.

robomartin 14y ago

I am going to give Yahoo the benefit of the doubt. I have a hard time believing that they'd pay $30M to gain five programmers. There's a lot more to this than we are aware of. C'mon folks, if you think the math doesn't add-up (as an acqui-hire) don't you think the folks at Yahoo can do basic arithmetic as well. I've also read a few posts on this thread saying as much as "there are no smart people at Yahoo" or "everyone at Yahoo is an idiot" (paraphrasing). Coming from folks at HN I think these kinds of statements are really unbecoming. Of course there are a lot of amazing people at Yahoo. Tons of them. Here's a bit of news for detractors: Business is hard. No, it is fucking hard. And, at their size and scale it is even harder. And, at the break-neck competitive speed of the internet, even harder still. Mere humans make mistakes. We can read the tea-leaves wrong and take the wrong road --or one that is less than ideal. In business this can cost you years before you regain your prior position. What matters is that you do not give up. I like Yahoo very much. They've been around for a long time and hopefully they'll be around a lot longer. They might eventually find a groove to fall into and light-up the afterburners. Stupid they are not. What they are doing is hard. What all of us are doing is hard, at any scale.

michaelochurch 14y ago
I have a hard time believing that they'd pay $30M to gain five programmers. That's a fairly standard acq-hire, actually. It's not just Yahoo that's paying over $5 million per head. It's ridiculous, when you consider that the value of an employment relationship (which can be ended by either party at any time) is set at 30-60 times the annual salary. (Just think about it: how is a relationship that lasts 4.5 years on average worth 50x salary?) As I said, either engineers are getting screwed, or acq-hires are signs of severe desperation and devastating information poverty. It seems to be both. I've also read a few posts on this thread saying as much as "there are no smart people at Yahoo" or "everyone at Yahoo is an idiot" (paraphrasing). Coming from folks at HN I think these kinds of statements are really unbecoming. Of course there are a lot of amazing people at Yahoo. Tons of them. I am dead sure that there are a lot of amazing engineers at Yahoo. It's just sad that the company is so calamitously bad at recognizing talent at the bottom that it has to hire external 17-year-olds. I'm sure they have plenty of great people who'd be thrilled to do an NLP/R&D project for just their regular salary. If I were at Yahoo right now, after this acq-hire I'd write Marissa Mayer an email: Dear Marissa, Hi, I'm Michael O. Church. My salary is now $500,000 and I have full autonomy to work on whatever project I want. Based on the rate you are paying for external talent, this salary is justified. I am dead sure I will deliver more economic value to Yahoo than I take from it, but I will choose my projects from here on out. If that is not acceptable to you, Friday is my last day. If you're writing $30-million acq-hire checks for 17-year-olds, you should fire every goddamn middle manager, because your ability to recognize talent at the bottom is for shit.

MortenK 14y ago

If it's that easy why don't you do it? Surely a self-proclaimed 1 in a 100 programmer could bang out a product ripe for aquihire in the time it took to write all these "don't care, but still" posts?

michaelochurch 14y ago
I never said that it's easy. We both know that it's not "easy" to get acq-hired for $30 million. It's also not easy to win the Powerball, even if any idiot has a chance. It is, however, a sign of something wrong in the economy. When a $6-million-per-engineer acq-hire (the team, not the product, is being bought) is going down, the company is paying about 50 years of an engineer's salary for an employment relationship. A job lasts, on average, 4.4 years according to BLS. Particulars to acq-hires only make that expected duration lower, but let's use 4.4 because we don't know what the "real number" here is. Executives bitch until they're blue in the face about paying 25% for a normal recruiter. It seems inconsistent to complain that your headhunter's charging you 25%, then pay 5000% for an HR acquisition. This means one of two things. The first is that, possibly, the employment relationship is worth that much. That is, it's worth $1.5 million per year (as opposed to the more typically cited figures, which are around $200,000) to employ an engineer. Well, then engineers are getting screwed. They're only getting ~7% of their total value-add (120k / 1620k) instead of 38% (120k / 320k). The second possibility is that engineers aren't getting screwed, but that companies are so bad at discovering talent internally that the only way the executives and get their hands on someone good is to buy people on the market at a very high price. That's not saying that there aren't good people at a company like Yahoo; only that the middle-management filter is so dysfunctional that executives don't know what they have. Let's say that in November, you pay $2000, out of desperation, for a new coat that's worth $175. When your lease ends in August and you're cleaning everything out, you find that you had an equally good coat in your apartment, just sitting there all winter. You couldn't spot it before because the place was such a pigsty. You'd feel like an idiot, then, wouldn't you? That's how executives deserve to feel if they acq-hire talent for $6 million but have capable people within (and I'm sure they must have some) who are being underutilized on trivial features and fourth-quadrant nonsense. If you simply don't have talent, then go ahead and buy it at a high price. If you have it and can't find or use it, then you need to scorched-earth your whole management structure.

blablabla123 14y ago

Haters gonna hate. When you were 17, did you have the opportunity to do such a thing? No, this is why you are jealous. It's thing to celebrate.

csmattryder 14y ago
It's not the fact he's 17. There are 25 year olds in startups, as recently as yesterday's Demo Day at YC, who've been given multi-million dollar investment and acquisition offers. It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less. But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand.
- blablabla123 14y ago
  >It's the fact that they paid $30m, for what essentially a lot of people here could build. Heck, Yahoo has talented hires, they could create a similar app from scratch for significantly less. Ok, I think get your point. Still I have to disagree. The thing is this, many successful ideas don't need lots of genuine innovation and creativity. Instead they need to be 1. realized, 2. at the right time and 3. targetted towards the right people. IMHO Facebook is a prime example for this. When you look at the history of communities, Facebook was by no means innovative. There have been plenty communities already and the world of communities progressed towards continuous improvements. In fact I used to be a vivid user of many Web 1.0 communities and watched with great excitement the transition from tech-people dominated communities towards general audience communities. Why did Yahoo not create Facebook? Well, it's the same reason small startups can drive big elephants out of business. I think there have been enough posts about this thing on HN in the past. >But they instead chose to buy it, at the stupidly high figure that they chose. That is why people just don't understand. 1. The authors did put a lot of time in it (yes, multiple people worked on that, check out the website's About) 2. A great number of users are using it 3. Yahoo is not the only company interested in taking over a working website. Market mechanics.

7952 14y ago

In large corporations new hires and acquisitions are handled by different teams. Both teams may be working for the same set of goals, but in ways that are often conflicting in a practical sense.