5 ms·

Bear with me while I ask a dumb question. Why pay $70M to acquire a startup just for their engineering and technical talent? What's the going rate for a really

by _greim_ 13y ago

Bear with me while I ask a dumb question. Why pay $70M to acquire a startup just for their engineering and technical talent? What's the going rate for a really good engineer nowadays, $150K? Why not just offer $180K? That difference adds up to a lot less than $70M.

nly 13y ago
because when you're on $150K, and enjoy your work, you won't jump ship to work with a dinosaur like Yahoo just for a pay rise?
- nandemo 13y ago
  I must be missing something. So Joe works as an employee at Somethingly earning 150k and won't jump ship to Yahoo for a pay rise. But after Yahoo acquires Somethingly -- and likely shuts down its product -- Joe will choose to keep working at Yahoo because...? Given that Joe presumably didn't have a say in the acquisition, what are the (non-monetary) merits of post-acquisition Yahoo over pre-acquisition Yahoo?
  - nostrademons 13y ago
    You're missing the effect of inertia. Most people do not continuously re-evaluate whether they would choose to be working at their employer if they were unemployed and seeking a new job. Instead, they continue the current status quo until things are blatantly wrong for them, and only then start looking around. This frees up mental energy to focus on things like actually getting their job done and having a life outside of work. Yahoo is betting that it wouldn't be able to induce someone to jump ship, but once they have jumped ship, their work environment is "good enough" to keep them. Well, most of them. It's the same reason why magazines and online services bill by subscription (it's a lot of effort to get someone to subscribe, but much easier to keep them subscribing), and why ISVs bundle a lot of crapware with major platforms (users wouldn't knowingly install their products, but if they're already installed they won't bother to remove them), and why UX designers make the default settings whatever benefits the company most (most users never change the defaults).
nostrademons 13y ago
When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't cut it for one reason or another. When a company does an acqhisition, they short circuit all that work, and get a pool of vetted, battle-hardened engineers who are known to work well together. That's worth a lot more than just the engineers' salaries, because there was a lot more than just their salary that went into convincing them to work for the startup. If they just offered $180K, a number of the employees would turn it down, because they go to work for the intangibles like having good coworkers or working on interesting products, and the only way that Yahoo can bring them on board are to keep those intangible perks intact until they find a way to assimilate them into the mothership.
- darkarmani 13y ago
  So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?
  - ghshephard 13y ago
    It's not fair to your existing employees, so you would end up having to pay all of them more money as well. This gets very expensive very fast. Quite often cheaper just to acquihire and end up paying the engineers (Existing and new) $150K.
    - nilkn 13y ago
      This doesn't make any sense since the founders of the company getting acquihired stand to gain a considerable amount of money from the acquisition. They'll still end up getting paid more than existing employees. In fact, they may get a "signing bonus" which exceeds the entire lifetime earnings of the existing employees. Besides, very few companies are transparent with salaries. If yours is not, that means that salary negotiation is not always fair to existing employees and they don't want you to know that. (It could also mean salary negotiation is unfair to the new hire as well.)
ghshephard 13y ago
It's actually a good question - I have a friend who is a technical recruiter, and she specializes in hiring entire departments from other companies. Her strategy is usually to offer a "leader" (quite often the manager, but sometimes the sr. technical player) who will take a role in convincing the others to come on board. Signing bonuses are usually around $200K-$500K depending on seniority, and vest (or the repayment portion disappears) after 2 years. The person responsible for convincing the others to come on board usually gets an additional $500K or so. But, this is for departments of 6-10 people. One reason why offering a higher salary is a non-starter, is that, in order to properly level those new employees, you end up having to pay all of your existing engineers more money as well. So, if you increase your existing engineers salary by $30K * 10,000 engineers, you just paid $300 million/year as opposed to paying a one time fee of $70mm.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
fotoblur 13y ago
My thoughts exactly. I'll broadcast this to Yahoo right now. Im a desirable hire in the Bay Area, who is working at a 200M+/year profitable company and on mobile. Give me a $1 million signing bonus and Ill leave my current team, and deliver those experiences and successes right onto your lap. The real issue here is this is a reward to investors for there failures. There is some other part of this story were just not privy to. It's a VC back deal. Apple only paid for Color's 20 engineers for $5M.

by _greim_ 13y ago

nly 13y ago

because when you're on $150K, and enjoy your work, you won't jump ship to work with a dinosaur like Yahoo just for a pay rise?

nandemo 13y ago
I must be missing something. So Joe works as an employee at Somethingly earning 150k and won't jump ship to Yahoo for a pay rise. But after Yahoo acquires Somethingly -- and likely shuts down its product -- Joe will choose to keep working at Yahoo because...? Given that Joe presumably didn't have a say in the acquisition, what are the (non-monetary) merits of post-acquisition Yahoo over pre-acquisition Yahoo?
- nostrademons 13y ago
  You're missing the effect of inertia. Most people do not continuously re-evaluate whether they would choose to be working at their employer if they were unemployed and seeking a new job. Instead, they continue the current status quo until things are blatantly wrong for them, and only then start looking around. This frees up mental energy to focus on things like actually getting their job done and having a life outside of work. Yahoo is betting that it wouldn't be able to induce someone to jump ship, but once they have jumped ship, their work environment is "good enough" to keep them. Well, most of them. It's the same reason why magazines and online services bill by subscription (it's a lot of effort to get someone to subscribe, but much easier to keep them subscribing), and why ISVs bundle a lot of crapware with major platforms (users wouldn't knowingly install their products, but if they're already installed they won't bother to remove them), and why UX designers make the default settings whatever benefits the company most (most users never change the defaults).

nostrademons 13y ago

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't cut it for one reason or another. When a company does an acqhisition, they short circuit all that work, and get a pool of vetted, battle-hardened engineers who are known to work well together. That's worth a lot more than just the engineers' salaries, because there was a lot more than just their salary that went into convincing them to work for the startup. If they just offered $180K, a number of the employees would turn it down, because they go to work for the intangibles like having good coworkers or working on interesting products, and the only way that Yahoo can bring them on board are to keep those intangible perks intact until they find a way to assimilate them into the mothership.

darkarmani 13y ago
So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?
- ghshephard 13y ago
  It's not fair to your existing employees, so you would end up having to pay all of them more money as well. This gets very expensive very fast. Quite often cheaper just to acquihire and end up paying the engineers (Existing and new) $150K.
  - nilkn 13y ago
    This doesn't make any sense since the founders of the company getting acquihired stand to gain a considerable amount of money from the acquisition. They'll still end up getting paid more than existing employees. In fact, they may get a "signing bonus" which exceeds the entire lifetime earnings of the existing employees. Besides, very few companies are transparent with salaries. If yours is not, that means that salary negotiation is not always fair to existing employees and they don't want you to know that. (It could also mean salary negotiation is unfair to the new hire as well.)

ghshephard 13y ago

It's actually a good question - I have a friend who is a technical recruiter, and she specializes in hiring entire departments from other companies. Her strategy is usually to offer a "leader" (quite often the manager, but sometimes the sr. technical player) who will take a role in convincing the others to come on board. Signing bonuses are usually around $200K-$500K depending on seniority, and vest (or the repayment portion disappears) after 2 years. The person responsible for convincing the others to come on board usually gets an additional $500K or so. But, this is for departments of 6-10 people. One reason why offering a higher salary is a non-starter, is that, in order to properly level those new employees, you end up having to pay all of your existing engineers more money as well. So, if you increase your existing engineers salary by $30K * 10,000 engineers, you just paid $300 million/year as opposed to paying a one time fee of $70mm.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

fotoblur 13y ago

My thoughts exactly. I'll broadcast this to Yahoo right now. Im a desirable hire in the Bay Area, who is working at a 200M+/year profitable company and on mobile. Give me a $1 million signing bonus and Ill leave my current team, and deliver those experiences and successes right onto your lap. The real issue here is this is a reward to investors for there failures. There is some other part of this story were just not privy to. It's a VC back deal. Apple only paid for Color's 20 engineers for $5M.