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Talent Acquisitions

marco.org

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Re: Talent Acquisitions

#81

Post by radley »

jazzychad wrote: post #37
tptacek wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't get that from Marco's post at all . I heard a developer saying "stop blaming indie developers for accepting generous offers from companies and start supporting their products instead".

Could be I misread the tone of the article. Perhaps I was reading it through the lens of everyone being upset about the current state of acquihires on the "Sparrow acquired by Google" thread. Even so, if you take his advice and do what you can to support software you love to keep it alive, in the long run it may not be enough. Either way, my comment about why these things happen still stands.

Sorry, it just seems your position assumes start-ups will fail and that's why they try to get acquired.

It's not hard to bootstrap. The hard part is coming to terms with what is actually sustainable. It takes a while to figure that out.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#82

Post by nilayp »

Sparrow being my favorite app... and Marco's post encouraged me to write a blog about the state of productivity apps in the App Store.

Excellent apps like Sparrow are damn expensive to write. If Apple cares about keeping companies like Sparrow alive (they should) they can do two things to help us.

1) Allow Apps to charge monthly/annual subscriptions. 2) Give ad/social marketing campaign data to devs so they know which of their efforts to attract users is working.

More details are on our blog post: http://blog.selligy.com/post/27652044305/apple-help-the-best...

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#83

Post by rayiner »

Domenic_S wrote: post #73
rayiner wrote: post #55

I don't understand the point of talent acquisitions. Couldn't you spend half the amount of money you would have buying the company just giving the developers enormous signing bonuses to come work for you? Why buy out the original investors in the target company when it's the developers you want?

It's really just a huge premium to get a team of people (this is important) who have built something similar to what you want to build (also important). And you get the IP as well, which is nice. In some cases you're consolidating power and shutting down competitors. It makes a lot of sense in some situations.

If you paid half that premium to the members of the team, you'd be much more likely to get them all to come over as a bloc than you are by purchasing the company. And you'd have the other half left over for hookers and blow.

Unless you value the goodwill or IP of the target company, it makes no sense to buy out the original investors of the target company.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#84

Post by earl »

ajross wrote: post #54
tptacek wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market price for their desktop app was $9.99. How much support do you think you were really offering them?

Which brings up a great digression: the app store gold rush has left us in a situation where it's no longer feasible to sell high-maintenance, low-market software directly to consumers. Consumers will buy games and media in high volume, so you can sell those at a discount. But email clients? Photo apps? Nope. The only way to make that stuff is to sell it as some kind of "cloud" service where you make your money on ey…

Worse yet, say someone looked at sparrow dying and wanted to clone it, because it looks like there's a business there. Now they'll be pinched by people being cheap as shit on the upside and google migrating some of the best features into their presumably free iphone client on the low side. So I think google has now poisoned the well for better gmail clients on mac/ios.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#85

Post by jazzychad »

radley wrote: post #81
jazzychad wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could be I misread the tone of the article. Perhaps I was reading it through the lens of everyone being upset about the current state of acquihires on the "Sparrow acquired by Google" thread. Even so, if you take his advice and do what you can to support software you love to keep it alive, in the long run it may not be enough. Either way, my comment about why these things happen still stands.

Sorry, it just seems your position assumes start-ups will fail and that's why they try to get acquired. It's not hard to bootstrap. The hard part is coming to terms with what is actually sustainable. It takes a while to figure that out.

Well yes, sort of http://cdixon.org/2012/05/18/the-default-state-of-a-startup-...

> The hard part is coming to terms with what is actually sustainable. It takes a while to figure that out.

Exactly. And if it takes longer to figure out than the money you have to burn, then why not at least try for some sort of exit before giving up completely?

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#86

Post by usea »

My take on this is: 'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

If you use and love a product, then the developers get acuihired and the product dies, getting upset about it is kind of childish. Get some perspective. You had X months with that product that you loved, it's better than 0 months.

If you built your own product that relied on theirs, well you knew the risks going in. Fare better next time.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#87

Post by egillie »

terhechte wrote: post #2

I'm the author of the popular Mac Instagram Client "InstaDesk" ( http://www.instadesk-app.com ) and I can only confirm this. The reason why I started this whole thing was because I was fed up with working in corporations and not being able to control my life. Now I can enjoy the sun during the day, outside, sitting at a lake, and work late into the evening - or vice versa work at the lake. Even if a huge corporation…

I'm with you on that. I'm doing a start-up just so I can enjoy the sun during the day, and work at night when I can't do anything outside anyways! I feel like now that we've got it backwards. We're not farmers, we don't need to work in daylight anymore...

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#88

Post by drewcrawford »

rayiner wrote: post #83
Domenic_S wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really just a huge premium to get a team of people (this is important) who have built something similar to what you want to build (also important). And you get the IP as well, which is nice. In some cases you're consolidating power and shutting down competitors. It makes a lot of sense in some situations.

If you paid half that premium to the members of the team, you'd be much more likely to get them all to come over as a bloc than you are by purchasing the company. And you'd have the other half left over for hookers and blow. Unless you value the goodwill or IP of the target company, it makes no sense to buy out the original investors of the target company.

You consider the position of the hirers, but you fail to consider the position of the investors and the founders. Why would they be incentivized to accept this offer?

First: why would the investors of a company allow the team to be bought out from under them? A good investor will align the incentives so that the founders are incentivized to exit at the same time as the investor.

Second: why would a founder of a successful company accept a hiring deal? Most founders (heck, most developers) turn down several job offers before the second cup of coffee. And even if the $ paid to founders for acquisition vs pure hire is identical, there is an important psychological distinction between being bought and being hired that affects both the negotiations and the status and authority of the "employee" at the acquiring company and thus their wellbeing and autonomy. These factors matter.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#89

Post by jarek »

terhechte wrote: post #23
jazzychad wrote: post #9

Well, congrats to Marco for having a successful and sustainable business where he has the option and leverage to decide what he wants to do when these offers come knocking. Most startup/bootstrapped companies are not in that position. Most end up failing and winding up with nothing, but there are some that will end up with these talent acquisition situations. Remember, both sides (the acquirers and the acquirees) hav…

In Sparrow's case, though, one has to say that it looks as if they had a sustainable business. After all, they were always in the top 30 of the App Stores. That should equivalent to a lot of money.

Apparently it wasn't enough lot of money to not make Google's offer interesting.

Re: Talent Acquisitions

#90

Post by amirmc »

bconway wrote: post #60
leftnode wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something you can really plan out from the beginning? How many millions of developers would love to be able to create a product that drives enough attention to ensure an acquihire? Who knows, you might be right and some developers might be able to think of an idea, build it, and market it successfully enough to get the acquihire they want (along with a big paycheck), but I suspect most just want to build a pr…

Is this something you can really plan out from the beginning? Yes, people build companies to flip all the time. Many/most of them don't make the front page of Hacker News.

Sure but it used to be that they were flipping a product/site. Users may have griped about the new management but the 'stuff' would still exist.

Seems strange to me that people would consider setting out to flip themselves (but I can believe that it happens).

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