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What happens after Yahoo acquires you

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Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#91

Post by wheels »

jackowayed wrote: post #84
wheels wrote: post #70

Hmm, for some reason they forgot to include: You sell your company for $50 million in Yahoo stock, which over the course of your two year tenure at Yahoo will see a tenfold increase in value up to $500 million and your team will use that wealth to go on to create a disruptive seed-stage funding group called Y Combinator. Must have been an oversight. I can't imagine 37signals only telling half of these stories to make…

Wow, did their stock actually 10x between when they got there and when they sold it?

I have no idea when the YC founders actually sold their Yahoo stock, but when Viaweb was bought, in an all stock deal, at the beginning of June 1998, YHOO was trading at $7/share. Two years later, around the time they left, it was at $70/share. I presume that both since the stock was skyrocketing and that because they had a vesting schedule that they still had a chunk of it when it hit that price.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#chart1:s...

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#92

Post by Vivtek »

tomkarlo wrote: post #83
hartror wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that the issue? The energy tends to come from the founders so how do you reliably transition away from the founders, whether it is without full company integration or not?

Regardless of whether you get acquired or not, if you build a company that won't persist without your individual presence, the process is still incomplete. (And what you really have is a vehicle for your individual talent.) Any company that's supposed to last more than a few years must be build so that it can handle key people leaving, because that's what people always do in the long term, one way or the other.

This reminds me of some quoted wisdom I heard back in the 80's about management styles and Star Trek: the difference between Picard and Kirk is that when Picard was away or taken over by an alien or what have you, the bridge crew could cope with the situation, while Kirk's absence meant that the Enterprise was utterly helpless.

If your team can't fight Romulans when you're down on the planet, you've failed as a manager, was the moral of the story.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#93

Post by callmeed »

edw519 wrote: post #16
SandB0x wrote: post #6

I once witnessed the moment when the messenger from the new management team comes over to explain to the brilliant engineers who built the company up from nothing about these "timesheets" they need to fill in, and how it's "really not a big deal". You could feel something dying over the course of the conversation. It was one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen, and I'm sure it's far worse if you are one o…

Is there a right way to do this? Yes. a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary. b. Don't fuck with it.

I pray that's the route SF will take with Heroku

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#94

Post by mgkimsal »

democracy wrote: post #50
SandB0x wrote: post #6

I once witnessed the moment when the messenger from the new management team comes over to explain to the brilliant engineers who built the company up from nothing about these "timesheets" they need to fill in, and how it's "really not a big deal". You could feel something dying over the course of the conversation. It was one of the most uncomfortable things I've ever seen, and I'm sure it's far worse if you are one o…

Why not just do the time-sheets?

I've been at a few companies that required timesheets of software devs, and it was always weird/awkward at best. They never wanted just hours - they wanted to know what was done as well.

Sometimes it's easy, sometimes it's not, but the thing that bugged me was that it eventually was used against you.

Mgr: "Oh.. well.. I see here you've only put in 38 hours on core projects this last week... this doesn't look too good to others."

Me: "Well, I was actually here in the building for 46 hours, but 8 of those hours were doing some other stuff that there's no timesheet entries for."

Mgr: "Oh... like what?"

Me: "Like answering questions from people in the building that have questions about some of the projects I'm working on - status updates, etc. Apparently you and the other managers aren't updating anyone, and they ask me."

Mgr: "That's not your job."

Me: "So... I should silently ignore them, or give them a canned response to go ask their own dept manager?"

Mgr: "yes. But that didn't take 8 hours last week!"

Me: "I was also doing some research on a couple new debugging tools."

Mgr: "There's no need for that - the senior engineers are making their decision next week about what tool you'll use."

Me: "OK...."

Mgr: "I don't want to see you make a habit of 38 hours a week from now on."

Me: "Ummm... the last 3 months I've been putting in 45-50 hours non-stop, and have been in on some weekends to work with some other people to hit the deadlines."

Mgr: "Yeah, that's great, but 38 hours..."

This is a composite of discussions I've had and colleagues have had with various managers over the years whenever timesheets are involved. YMMV.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#95

Post by brisance »

kscaldef wrote: post #85
brisance wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was a really long time ago, at the beginning of the dot-com craze. On the contrary, in the last 5 years, YHOO share prices have declined about 50%. http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO+Interactive#chart2:s...

Sure, but there's also 2003-2005, where the stock increased several fold. It matters a lot where you pick your start and end points with tech companies in the last 15 years.

Yes, but if you read the article, all the acquisitions were done in 2005 onwards i.e. in the last 5 years. It was quite clear by then that the dot-com bubble had burst.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#98

Post by ajays »

petervandijck wrote: post #32
pasbesoin wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've witnessed numerous efforts to "measure" "morale". Couched in positive language, they inevitably ended up being increasingly bad efforts to paper over failure to address underlying (or over-arching) issues. Here's a question: Why do you need timesheets? You didn't before. What's changed? If you can't -- legally -- avoid them, at least be honest about it. And don't let them become a tool for petty tyrants. (Oh, an…

Surely timesheets are never a legal requirement?

If you're working for a government grant or project, you are required to fill in timesheets. I knew people in Lockheed, Grumman, etc. who had to diligently fill out which project they were working on, so that their time could be billed to the right grant or agency.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#99

Post by ajays »

democracy wrote: post #76
InclinedPlane wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because creating software is a creative endeavor that requires talented and skilled individuals working imaginatively. Timesheets and other bureaucratic overhead are poisonous to that process. The best software can't be created in a factory assembly line with interchangeable drones.

So the companies acquired by Yahoo created the best software? Even from the technical point of view the majority is an average project and an average team, I really don't see why someone acquired is different from the rest of the owner company.

I don't know why you're dragging Yahoo into the timesheets discussion. Yahoo does not have timesheets.

Re: What happens after Yahoo acquires you

#100

Post by wh-uws »

tptacek wrote: post #63
democracy wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just do the time-sheets?

For one thing, because it is part of the way that your team is turned into a Resource. I never watched Star Trek, but I'm pop-culture literate, and my understanding is they use something called "nanoprobes" to effect the process of "assimilation". Once you're assimilated, business decisions that impact your team become an MBA math abstraction to the parent company leadership. Time sheets are BigCo's mechanism for map…

there is something about timecard software that brings out the worst in enterprise software developers. I have never, ever seen one implemented well.

If I could upvote that a thousand times I would.

Why o why is this so true? And why hasn't anyone done anything about it?

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