4 ms·

Love this. I have felt at times that I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value. This kind of

Love this. I have felt at times that I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value. This kind of relationship is becoming more and more frustrating over time. I feel like we sold our birthright.

seiji 13y ago
I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value. You've gotta flip your situation around. Try to be someone they can't do without. That's the acquihire game. Instead of being a resume monkey, go make something (useful? popular? at least popular with useful people.) then sell yourself (and n employees) to a company for $30 million dollars (you, as founder, of course keep about $20 million, $10 million goes to investors (?), and your employees each get nice $30k "retention packages" at the new employer). People end up making $875 million dollars because they become symbols. They become seen as giant symphony conductors forcing the unwashed masses to act harmoniously — without them, there would be no Success, therefore they deserve most of the reward. We all know Success is foresight and direction, not physical labor. All labor is replaceable cogs and should be priced to the floor. Executed Vision has infinite demand and severely limited supply. Our birthright, if we can state it so audaciously, is understanding how things work and building new solutions the general public can't make on their own. These days, normal brilliant tech people get squeezed out of economic validity from two sides. On on side, there's an influx of strong personality tech people who want all the glory for themselves and they end up exploiting the quiet brilliant tech people. On the other side, there's strong personality non-tech people who swoop in and think they can "control" or "manage" or "direct" quiet brilliant tech people towards greatness (because they have Vision and quiet brilliant tech people just sit around staring at little colored dots all day long). But, in actual non-HN-everybody-is-a-change-the-world-founder reality, most quiet brilliant tech people are, on balance, not interested in organizing and building crush-the-world corporations. They're sitting around spewing off enough wasted potential to fuel six entire earth economies until they are picked up and organized together into a coherent operation. But, they will be paid 1/10th to 1/1000th of their actual value to the corporation, economy, and world. (also amusing, if you paste this into google (no quotes) you get a pg article ("How to Make Wealth") as the second result: I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value.)
- beat 13y ago
  Aquihire is a failure mode. Company builds a good team, but the product can't get enough traction to be sold on its own merits. ${BIGCORP) swoops in and buys out the company for a LOT less than it would be worth with a successful product, ditches the product and handcuffs the team. It's a less awful ending for a startup than going bankrupt and folding the company, but it's not an actual business plan! Sheesh, if I'm pouring a few years of my life into creating a product, I hope it's more than an elaborate flirtation to get hired at Google with a signing bonus!
  - seiji 13y ago
    It's both a failure mode and a safety switch. The safety switch is like the old game of "Would you rather have $100 now or a 5% chance of $1000 in four years?" The failure mode is the truth of public markets are absolutely closed to new entrants unless you are selling a mass market physical product or if you have over 500 million monthly users on some web service. Given the diminishing marginal utility of cash, a few million dollars RFN is tastier than a few billion dollars when you are $age+7 years old. We can always try again later, right? I'm pouring a few years of my life into creating a product That's a great point too. A lot of people get very endeared to their products and companies. Their companies are them. Other people make companies only as vehicles to flip and cash out. It's up to you. They aren't compatible viewpoints though. The company-is-part-of-me people see the make-it-then-flip-it contingency equivalent to people who only have babies to extract government benefit checks.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    Acqui-hire means: (1) $3-6 million per engineer, with investors, founders, and executives getting most of that money. Most of these don't get rich in the VC-istan sense, but they get enough money to buy a house. Founders join Those Who Have Completed An Exit and are now seen as real human beings by VCs. (2) engineers get hired as contractors, which is a 12-month interview process with better results than the front-door process (75%, as opposed to 45% with a real introduction and sub-1% on a job site) and might make back the ~$50k they lost by working below market salary. Acqui-hire is bad but it's not quite a failure. It means the founders get paid, and the engineers get about the same payoff as they would have had in a corporate job. (Whether it's good or bad for them comes down to the assimilation process; it's usually somewhat negative.) It does, however, mean that the engineers get screwed relative to the startup promise (of being an executive, or rich, or able to do the most interesting engineering work, some day).
michaelochurch 13y ago
I feel like we sold our birthright. We did, and for what? One in a thousand of us gets to be to be a billionaire, and the other 999 suffer declining autonomy, less interesting work, less stable employment conditions, and a psychotic housing market driven not by engineer compensation, but by the zillion VPs of NTWTFK (Non-Technical-Who-The-Fuck-Knows) who cash out their equity before it becomes toilet paper and can afford to bid up, into the mid-seven-digit range, what were supposed to be middle-class houses. We can take our industry back, but it won't happen in VC-istan.
- Zimahl 13y ago
  We can take our industry back, but it won't happen in VC-istan. It all depends on what you want, and unless you read this website with a grain of salt you are just playing into it. HN is about the big score. Sure, sometimes there are insightful articles on building a business but really this place is all about big ideas, big funding, big acquisitions, and the corresponding big cashout. The long-tail business that makes money and provides a service for it's customers is really what is valuable, and you can still be a millionaire. I think a lot of the young developers think too much of the results - money, women, cars, houses, toys - and not what it takes to get there.
  - michaelochurch 13y ago
    If you start a similar forum based on the mid-growth/mid-risk sector that VCs deride as "lifestyle businesses", I will be there. I'd like to see a continued interest in the "big ideas" and technological advancement, without the big-money obsessions that make our generation so exploitable. Real machine-learning work == made of awesome. $850 million acquisition == who gives a fuck?
mseebach 13y ago
Oh, please, with the sanctimonious hyperbole bullshit. You're NOT a poor, helpless worker being exploited by a ruthless 19th century steel-magnate with a monocle and a top-hat, you're a member of the most empowered generation of the most empowered professional class in the history of mankind, full stop. If you somehow feel you're in a situation that needs fixing, then, especially as HN reader, you know exactly what to do.
- thetrumanshow 13y ago
  "you know exactly what to do" Indeed, I do, and I am doing it. Others, however, need the guidance of the sentiments we express here. It was for them, and for our industry, that I expressed this thought. If you follow michaelochurch, he's like the Angry Patrick McKenzie. He also has a flare for the dramatic. But the purpose is to raise the visibility of ideas, and to express agreement and disagreement. I have a similar track. I would like so see our industry move in the direction of entrepreneurship/leadership and away from servitude. Again with the hyperbole, but helps the message hit home. ;)

seiji 13y ago

I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value. You've gotta flip your situation around. Try to be someone they can't do without. That's the acquihire game. Instead of being a resume monkey, go make something (useful? popular? at least popular with useful people.) then sell yourself (and n employees) to a company for $30 million dollars (you, as founder, of course keep about $20 million, $10 million goes to investors (?), and your employees each get nice $30k "retention packages" at the new employer). People end up making $875 million dollars because they become symbols. They become seen as giant symphony conductors forcing the unwashed masses to act harmoniously — without them, there would be no Success, therefore they deserve most of the reward. We all know Success is foresight and direction, not physical labor. All labor is replaceable cogs and should be priced to the floor. Executed Vision has infinite demand and severely limited supply. Our birthright, if we can state it so audaciously, is understanding how things work and building new solutions the general public can't make on their own. These days, normal brilliant tech people get squeezed out of economic validity from two sides. On on side, there's an influx of strong personality tech people who want all the glory for themselves and they end up exploiting the quiet brilliant tech people. On the other side, there's strong personality non-tech people who swoop in and think they can "control" or "manage" or "direct" quiet brilliant tech people towards greatness (because they have Vision and quiet brilliant tech people just sit around staring at little colored dots all day long). But, in actual non-HN-everybody-is-a-change-the-world-founder reality, most quiet brilliant tech people are, on balance, not interested in organizing and building crush-the-world corporations. They're sitting around spewing off enough wasted potential to fuel six entire earth economies until they are picked up and organized together into a coherent operation. But, they will be paid 1/10th to 1/1000th of their actual value to the corporation, economy, and world. (also amusing, if you paste this into google (no quotes) you get a pg article ("How to Make Wealth") as the second result: I am simply a mine from which some smart business guy with some capital leverage can delve and extract value.)

beat 13y ago
Aquihire is a failure mode. Company builds a good team, but the product can't get enough traction to be sold on its own merits. ${BIGCORP) swoops in and buys out the company for a LOT less than it would be worth with a successful product, ditches the product and handcuffs the team. It's a less awful ending for a startup than going bankrupt and folding the company, but it's not an actual business plan! Sheesh, if I'm pouring a few years of my life into creating a product, I hope it's more than an elaborate flirtation to get hired at Google with a signing bonus!
- seiji 13y ago
  It's both a failure mode and a safety switch. The safety switch is like the old game of "Would you rather have $100 now or a 5% chance of $1000 in four years?" The failure mode is the truth of public markets are absolutely closed to new entrants unless you are selling a mass market physical product or if you have over 500 million monthly users on some web service. Given the diminishing marginal utility of cash, a few million dollars RFN is tastier than a few billion dollars when you are $age+7 years old. We can always try again later, right? I'm pouring a few years of my life into creating a product That's a great point too. A lot of people get very endeared to their products and companies. Their companies are them. Other people make companies only as vehicles to flip and cash out. It's up to you. They aren't compatible viewpoints though. The company-is-part-of-me people see the make-it-then-flip-it contingency equivalent to people who only have babies to extract government benefit checks.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  Acqui-hire means: (1) $3-6 million per engineer, with investors, founders, and executives getting most of that money. Most of these don't get rich in the VC-istan sense, but they get enough money to buy a house. Founders join Those Who Have Completed An Exit and are now seen as real human beings by VCs. (2) engineers get hired as contractors, which is a 12-month interview process with better results than the front-door process (75%, as opposed to 45% with a real introduction and sub-1% on a job site) and might make back the ~$50k they lost by working below market salary. Acqui-hire is bad but it's not quite a failure. It means the founders get paid, and the engineers get about the same payoff as they would have had in a corporate job. (Whether it's good or bad for them comes down to the assimilation process; it's usually somewhat negative.) It does, however, mean that the engineers get screwed relative to the startup promise (of being an executive, or rich, or able to do the most interesting engineering work, some day).

michaelochurch 13y ago

I feel like we sold our birthright. We did, and for what? One in a thousand of us gets to be to be a billionaire, and the other 999 suffer declining autonomy, less interesting work, less stable employment conditions, and a psychotic housing market driven not by engineer compensation, but by the zillion VPs of NTWTFK (Non-Technical-Who-The-Fuck-Knows) who cash out their equity before it becomes toilet paper and can afford to bid up, into the mid-seven-digit range, what were supposed to be middle-class houses. We can take our industry back, but it won't happen in VC-istan.

Zimahl 13y ago
We can take our industry back, but it won't happen in VC-istan. It all depends on what you want, and unless you read this website with a grain of salt you are just playing into it. HN is about the big score. Sure, sometimes there are insightful articles on building a business but really this place is all about big ideas, big funding, big acquisitions, and the corresponding big cashout. The long-tail business that makes money and provides a service for it's customers is really what is valuable, and you can still be a millionaire. I think a lot of the young developers think too much of the results - money, women, cars, houses, toys - and not what it takes to get there.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  If you start a similar forum based on the mid-growth/mid-risk sector that VCs deride as "lifestyle businesses", I will be there. I'd like to see a continued interest in the "big ideas" and technological advancement, without the big-money obsessions that make our generation so exploitable. Real machine-learning work == made of awesome. $850 million acquisition == who gives a fuck?

mseebach 13y ago

Oh, please, with the sanctimonious hyperbole bullshit. You're NOT a poor, helpless worker being exploited by a ruthless 19th century steel-magnate with a monocle and a top-hat, you're a member of the most empowered generation of the most empowered professional class in the history of mankind, full stop. If you somehow feel you're in a situation that needs fixing, then, especially as HN reader, you know exactly what to do.

thetrumanshow 13y ago
"you know exactly what to do" Indeed, I do, and I am doing it. Others, however, need the guidance of the sentiments we express here. It was for them, and for our industry, that I expressed this thought. If you follow michaelochurch, he's like the Angry Patrick McKenzie. He also has a flare for the dramatic. But the purpose is to raise the visibility of ideas, and to express agreement and disagreement. I have a similar track. I would like so see our industry move in the direction of entrepreneurship/leadership and away from servitude. Again with the hyperbole, but helps the message hit home. ;)