I'm assuming Google doesn't need any of the company's business, and that it is being acquired for its talent.
So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
> And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?
Yes, they're called "golden handcuffs". You basically get a compensation package so good that it'd be stupid to leave. Usually they try to get you to stay 3-5 but YMMV.
And what of the ones that don't get brought on? Do they get anything for their equity typically? For key employees i can see them sticking around, but early hire support staff that may not be needed could still have considerable equity.
I was part of a fairly large acquisition by a big player. Support types got handcuffs of about $20k over 4 years. Engineers got anywhere from $150k/4 years to $600k/4 years. Some got even more.
This was all independent of equity. Any vested equity was cashed out. Unvested equity converted to equivalent shares in the new company, with the same vesting schedule as before.
Most startups use double trigger acceleration for vesting. The first trigger was the acquisition and the second was the termination (not offered a position). So they would vest their entire equity grant.
Of course that implies that the equity is worth anything. Most acquihires are at low multiples so the VCs tend to take the entire price, leaving founders and employees with nothing.
Even in low multiples typically the VCs creates a decent incentive for the founders to stay at the acquired company (otherwise the acquihire will fail), but they aren't getting filthy rich.
I would be curious about "most". My n=1 experience didn't have acceleration terms. In fact, all of my remaining unvested ISO's vanished at acquisition ...
Interesting. And I assume that there's a lot of fudge room on the valuation as well with more of it being shifted towards hiring bonuses for those kept on?
Aren't Google acquihire offers conditional on passing the usual Google employee screening process?
I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
Say your employer is bought by Google - are you axed because you slept poorly and couldn't prove Fermat's Last Theorem on the whiteboard in 15 minutes?
I don't know about Google, but I've heard of this happening during other acquisitions. A friend of mine with a Ph.D. in CS worked at a startup that was just acquired. He was responsible for the a lot of the tech in the platform they were acquiring, yet since he didn't pass their algorithms heavy interview they didn't want to hire him. He ended up working for one of the other companies interested in buying the startup.
I have heard that Facebook also has a rigorous screening process for acquihires too, and people get sent away althought with a generous severance package.
The industry complains about being unable to find enough programming talent, while dismissing entire swathes of highly trained, highly educated people for investing in themselves.
What a PhD in CS teaches you is how to do research in CS. This skill may or may not be valuable for a specific company and may or may not intersect with raw dev chops. Production Dev is a distinct skill from CS research.
As a dev who has both interviewed and worked with several dozen PhDs and ABDs, the intersection of skills required to both be a great developer and complete (or nearly complete) a PhD are nearly zero.
That doesn't make sense at all. I do not see why a PhD would disproportionally filter out people with talent for coding, so that the graduates even after years of industry experience afterwards would still be unable to be great at coding.
No, but not having a PhD filters out people without a talent for coding. Same with not having a college degree at all - it's not that going to college makes you worse at coding, but that getting a coding job without a college degree requires you to be better at coding.
I'm speaking anecdotally, and there are many ways my sample may be biased. (Also, maybe bad PhD devs make sure everyone knows they have PhDs, while competent devs never mention it?).
OTOH, there could be something in culture and personality that pushes lesser devs into getting PhDs.
the assumption here is that people can only learn at adequately fast rates before earning their phd? aka, isnt the expectation that if you can earn a phd in at least a highly related industry you should be able to pick up just about anything. Are they going to know how to wrangle a huge dev ops stack into submission, or pump data through some realtime frame work to maximize throughput or setup paxos properly from day 0, fine. but neither does any other entry level engineer and these guys can either learn it or be placed on a different team within the company that does deeper research that would make use of their phd...
One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google. He had designed and contributed a decent portion of the core of the product. One of his projects for the company had about 50 stars on github.
I am terribly sorry. While looking up information about the company to be able to answer the reply, I couldn't find any news about its acquisition by Google. It was shuttered by its parent company and I presume a portion of the company must have been sold to Google if my colleague was being accurate. I can't edit or delete the comment. If I'm unvoted/downvoted then I certainly understand and agree!
More info: he is a director for a well-used standard in the IETF, so he's no slouch.
> One of my former colleagues failed to pass his interview after his company was acquihired by Google
amazing: they spend n million dollars just to get that talented individual, and then just throw it all away. My question is how is this expense reported/justified and who gets the difference? What about shareholder value?
not to troll or anything but I find it utterly stupid that this is done. Also is it a big deal to have 1000 stars on a github project you run? I am curious because I do not know what the general perception is of github projects, I mean how much do they matter? I do not have a formal training on algorithms and I am studying machine learning now. Also I have a project having 200 something stars and one having 1000+ stars
1000+ stars is a pretty big deal! I imagine you could leverage this to gain software development job interviews if you were looking.
Do they matter? It is just one of many metrics of how useful a repository is. I think it's one of the most public metrics that can be distilled to a single factoid on HN. There are absolutely better metrics to judge the quality of software.
from what I've seen at Google specifically, when hiring for team talent, acquihires are typically performed in a binary fashion -- they take everybody who wants to go, without going through the regular screening process.
Speaking from personal experience, that's not always true.
When the company I worked for was acquired for team talent, they interviewed all but a handful of the engineers. Around half were given full time offers. Another group were given fixed-term offers and the remaining engineers didn't make it in.
I was given a fixed-term offer. Several months and many interviews later, I made it in as a full time employee. I was never outright rejected, but due to circumstances involving my contract and project work, I probably took around 9-12 Google interviews over that time.
They aren't fun. But in the end, I'd say it was worth it.
I doubt this is always true. I've been involved in acqui{hire,sition} due diligence for a number of startup at a couple of different (large) internet companies. My experience has been that the terms can vary quite a bit, both in the set of folks given an offer (all, all or none, some) and in valuation relative to average developer comp at the acquirer.
I believe anaskar is saying that, for the one instance they've seen, Google either takes on the entire team or no one, and they don't do the normal Google interview.
And he may be right for n=1, but I know of n>1 instances where he's incorrect and whole teams were not taken. I even know of one instance where the CEO/founder was non-technical and they refused to allow him to remain in charge of the product post-acquisition. The direct of product, who was a Google SWE before the acquisition, took over.
> I ask this not to be negative, but out of serious curiosity.
And yet you referred to it as "BS" and provided a sarcastic example in the same post. I'd say your attempt not to be negative and to sound serious failed.
Google's "Bachelor of Science" interview screening process? I'd assume that they would have an interview that would be appropriate to the degree they obtained. I'd also be surprised if Fermat's last theorem would be involved in any way - that's more of a math problem, and isn't relevant to the work of most software engineers.
From what I know, Google's NLP service does not include intent extraction. Intent extraction is essential for voice command interfaces, such as those in Siri and Google Now. But I don't see why they would need to buy a startup for that, when they can do it themselves even better.
What about the possibility of Google being scared of being outrun or innovated out of its position in the AI race? Google does not have a monopoly on smart people.
...should know better than to use products and services online?
Your comment is as toxic as the acquihire culture itself, and only makes users feel less "part of the internet" when companies treat them as disposable.
It's a cynical comment, but one that (sadly) may serve users well.
It's like the "assume your equity is worth zero" heuristic that many of us (including myself) employ when advising friends. It's not strictly accurate, and if taken truly literally it may poison the well for the startup ecosystem, but following this heuristic would prevent painful events for many employees.
Having been in numerous situations like this, I actually now "know better" than to rely on some 3rd party API that's not easily portable.
That's probably why most startups that provide infrastructure as a service are built on open source (using open standards) from day one. Otherwise good luck getting any traction
Should know better than to rely on and pay for a service without some kind of assurance that it won't simply be switched off with little warning. Maybe expect a bond big enough to keep the service running in its current form for N years?
It's better for potential users to be aware of how often this happens, than go on in ignorance of it.
Should know better than to be locked into products and services online. Buying a hairdryer from Amazon is one thing, as the hairdryer is 'immutable' but relying on a product for a workflow at work or your day to day life and having it pulled is a danger. That's why I'd use Jira or MS Word over something offered by shiny new startup. Even better use markdown files on your local drive. Back it up at Dropbox sure but make sure it is backed up somewhere else too(!).
What do the founders typically do within the acquiring corp after the acquisition? Do they have any agency? Or are they just another set of middle managers for the meat grinder?
From my admittedly limited experience, they try to fight the good fight for a little while before being defeated by the corporate bureaucracy and then sit around waiting for their vesting to end.
It's unusual for an acquihire to have real agency in a big company. It's usually the middle management route - or worse - the limbo of having nothing real to do like the parody scenario in the Silicon Valley tv show.
I was at a startup 15 years ago where the "nothing real to do" scenario played out to the letter.
They were bought by Gemstar-TV Guide, who moved the team to their office and then apparently forgot they'd bought the company. Our team pretty much had no duties other than showing up to "work". No one got shiny golden handcuffs, but they did get their salaries paid for a year. Eventually someone from HQ figured this out and everyone got the boot.
I was the lone holdout. Instead of moving with the team, I'd gotten a nice offer from Adobe and decided to run with it. The good news was that my job lasted for more than a year. The bad news was that I actually had to work.
It certainly can be. However, if it's a 'golden handcuffs' situation a 'guaranteed' vest of several million dollars for a 3-5 year commitment is something that I would certainly be willing to take.
I think that's the point. Sometimes the acquiring company is hoping you'll get bored or fed up and walk out before you can vest. Why would they keep you productive which only serves to sustain your incentive to earn a couple million, when they can instead pay only a salary and hope you give up before your years are up?
I hate the definition of "acquihiring", which seems to have been written by a PR firm. It's made out to sound like an altruistic process that magically overrides the business's normal strategy where all that matters is the bottom line and bowing to investors / board members. The reality is that when acquihired, you've entered a new company with its own culture, underhanded and ruthless politics, and ulterior motives.
There is very little truly irreplaceable talent worth paying millions for. What an acquihire is really saying is "We need your help to transition this product into our company's structure. We can't do this in only 2 weeks, so we'll say now that you will be with us for years. Secretly we hope you leave shortly after the difficult transition is completed, but before we have to pay you".
If any business out there acquihires to the spirit of the definition, thanks for being of a rare species.
The engineers are not getting that obviously, it depends on how much equity they have and the difference between the amount of VC money pumped into a company and the final sale price of the company. VCs often get 2x preferred stock (at the minimum - it entitles them to 2x what they invested). This is before anyone else is allowed to see a dime. Every term sheet is different of course.
The value of the team is also larger than the individual engineers on it. Plus, a package bid is less risky if you're looking to get the entire package.
Oh, and poaching has another risk - that you get only the worst employees.
Depends on whether it is an all cash, all stock, or mixed deal.
Typically a "shotgun" clause is triggered and all employees immediately vest and cash out.
Founders, however, negotiate "earn out" clauses with the acquirer, which provides some upfront cash with the balance to be paid out over time, contingent on performance or retention goals.
Edit: I should add Firebase could have(and should have) been the next PHP/Access. Could have solved almost every SMB business custom software need in a way that a business could go from front-end to front-end and never get locked into another 1,000 crud app for XYZ vertical. Could have wiped it all out. Firebase could have become the data store of the internet. Then Google showed up....
Firebase uses a non-relational database correct? Shouldn't they then run into issues with problems that do not lend well to non-relational databases? I don't see how Firebase could have been anywhere near as pervasive as PHP.
My question is why would someone want to send their data to some api on the cloud rather than processing it locally himself using the numerous open source packages available to do this sort of thing?
For a lot of things, using a self-hosted open-source package is a good idea, absolutely.
However, for some applications there's a vendor with a neural network (or whatever) trained on a billion inputs, you see it perform better than the open source equivalent trained on a million inputs, and you don't have a billion inputs to improve the open source version with.
So, my real question: how much, on average, does a founder get as part of one of these acquihires? And does s/he actually, y'know, have to do any work after getting paid?