All we are missing is a league where these players can be drafted and traded.
Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
31–40 of 73 posts
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#32$2-4M/person, just for the people. Boy does this sound like the telecom bubble, and the internet bubble before that. The music is playing, find a chair.
No. Suppose these 8 guys are paid $150k a year on average. Engineers, good ones at least, bring in more than they cost. In some cases like Instagram and Facebook, the ratio of users to engineers is in the millions. Google is similar. When you also bring into account the caché of someone like Rose, the lifetime earnings from that team probably well exceeds what was spent to aquire them.
cachet
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
> quite a price for some gifted people! Every time I saw this happen in the 90s the result was the same: Small team shows up in big company after big $$, gets frustrated with big company BS, doesn't really care and runs down the game clock until vesting is nearly complete, leaves without fanfare. I'm sure there must be counter examples, please let me know some if you have them.
Two team-centric acquisitions that Google has made in recent years: Aardvark and Slide. Both were cases of products that were mostly ahead of their time or just-off re: product-market fit, and had genius teams. As far as I know, the majority of both teams are still at Google.
Max Levchin left Google and Aardvark was shut down.
Google had Foursquare in house (called Dodgeball) but couldn't execute.
Android is the best counter-example I can think of.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. Suppose these 8 guys are paid $150k a year on average. Engineers, good ones at least, bring in more than they cost. In some cases like Instagram and Facebook, the ratio of users to engineers is in the millions. Google is similar. When you also bring into account the caché of someone like Rose, the lifetime earnings from that team probably well exceeds what was spent to aquire them.
Your argument assumes that that "caché" will translate into instant/increased earnings. That is far from a given.
Niggle : Cachet is the version that means 'prestige; distinction', caché is 'hidden' - both from 'cacher' (to hide, French).
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just incredible. Milk made one application , gave it away for free, summarily shut it down, and sold for $15 - $30 million. I understand these guys are very talented, and that Google was buying the talent more than the product, but that's quite a price for some gifted people!
> quite a price for some gifted people! Every time I saw this happen in the 90s the result was the same: Small team shows up in big company after big $$, gets frustrated with big company BS, doesn't really care and runs down the game clock until vesting is nearly complete, leaves without fanfare. I'm sure there must be counter examples, please let me know some if you have them.
"I'm sure there must be counter examples"
Measure Map was a small team acquired by google that made a pretty analytics app for blogs and they went on to overhaul Google Analytics, which at the time still look pretty rough because it was an acquired app (Urchin) that was made for power users.
That team worked pretty well. After everyone vested, Jeff Veen put the band back together and they started cranking out other apps, first WikiRank and then Typekit, which was just bought by Adobe.
I can see the parallels with Milk: 1) a small interdisciplinary team that works well together and with a kickass designer (Daniel Burka) that has a knack for making the complex look simple, and 2) an app like Google+ that's just as important to their new core mission as Analytics was to their old one and also has similar room for improvement.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
All employees should bring in more than they cost. Even the fry guy at McDonalds. Otherwise why would you employ them?
... in aggregate. there are lots of people in even small companies that work for "cost centers"...
Even "cost centers" are a net benefit, unless something is horribly broken.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#37$2-4M/person, just for the people. Boy does this sound like the telecom bubble, and the internet bubble before that. The music is playing, find a chair.
That's just incredible. Milk made one application , gave it away for free, summarily shut it down, and sold for $15 - $30 million. I understand these guys are very talented, and that Google was buying the talent more than the product, but that's quite a price for some gifted people!
So I heard this hundred times before and while it feels like Google (in this example) is making mistake, perhaps the second bottom here is that they wanted to shut down a competitor (at some field) and the nice way of doing it is to acquire. Then Google won't care if they find themselves behind gold cage of Google or not. They may leave or whatever. I don't think dropping $30MM is a big problem for Google either. For me or you that may be a waste, for Google it is 1) drop in the ocean 2) cheap way to shut them down.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
> quite a price for some gifted people! Every time I saw this happen in the 90s the result was the same: Small team shows up in big company after big $$, gets frustrated with big company BS, doesn't really care and runs down the game clock until vesting is nearly complete, leaves without fanfare. I'm sure there must be counter examples, please let me know some if you have them.
Two team-centric acquisitions that Google has made in recent years: Aardvark and Slide. Both were cases of products that were mostly ahead of their time or just-off re: product-market fit, and had genius teams. As far as I know, the majority of both teams are still at Google.
Very little of the Aardvark team is left at Google, and those who are are scattered across different teams.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's just incredible. Milk made one application , gave it away for free, summarily shut it down, and sold for $15 - $30 million. I understand these guys are very talented, and that Google was buying the talent more than the product, but that's quite a price for some gifted people!
> quite a price for some gifted people! Every time I saw this happen in the 90s the result was the same: Small team shows up in big company after big $$, gets frustrated with big company BS, doesn't really care and runs down the game clock until vesting is nearly complete, leaves without fanfare. I'm sure there must be counter examples, please let me know some if you have them.
Andy Rubin and the Android team had a pretty big impact on Google.
Re: Winning A Bidding War With Facebook, Google Picks Up The Entire Milk Team
#40$2-4M/person, just for the people. Boy does this sound like the telecom bubble, and the internet bubble before that. The music is playing, find a chair.
I remember hearing in 2008 that Google valued engineers at 1-3m per. At Google's scale, an engineer can theoretically create at least that much value over a normal tenure (and denies their competition access to that resource).
Google makes $1.2M/yr/employee... Presumably quite a bit more if you count dollars per engineer. I know it's not quite so simple as "add an engineer and make more revenue", but it seems correlative.