That's the most expensive set of Chromium extensions.
Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
71–80 of 113 posts
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
To be honest, they are buying failed teams as most of the acqui-hires they've done are of companies which are struggling to raise their next round.
A team that built a failed product is not the same as a failed team.
Agreed - it is not always true. But I would rather have a team building successful products rather than the other way round.
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
This acquisition reminds me a lot of Hunch. It's a similar size in terms of team + cost per team member. $2-3M/employee. And, Hunch's core tech seems to have gone into the eBay homepage, which is what Sarah is proposing Yahoo do with Rockmelt.
Why can't you poach employees for less than $2M each?
See nostrademons comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6149858
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#74Does anyone have any real insight into the strategy behind all of these acquisitions? Apart from blasé speculation about acqui-hiring (for what products?) and supposition that Yahoo executives are merely stupid, I'd be interested to understand the broader pattern. It's a real news story, and something is going on. There is a strategy. What is it?
Bail out the VC who sit's on public company boards.
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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 c…
So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo needs talent to succeed. Yahoo, in general, cannot compete with Google, Facebook or smaller startups for talent. They're better off now than they were prior to Marissa but they're still a definite second best. So they are buying talent to stock the shelves with first rate devs and leaders - mostly in mobile. At some point - say in 6 - 18 more months - talent may come to work for them to work with some of these…
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.
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.
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 c…
So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?
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.
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#78For those keeping score, this gives another win for Khosla Ventures, SV Angel, a16z, and First Round. Here's the tally for those who invested in companies that have been acquired by Y! since Mayer took over: CrunchFund - 3 (Stamped, GoPollGo, Tumblr) True Ventures - 3 (OnTheAir, Snip.It, Lexity) Khosla Venture - 3 (Snip.It, Xobni, Rockmelt) SV Angel - 3 (Snip,It, Xobni, Rockmelt) Google Ventures - 2 (Astrid & Stamped…
This acquisition reminds me a lot of Hunch. It's a similar size in terms of team + cost per team member. $2-3M/employee. And, Hunch's core tech seems to have gone into the eBay homepage, which is what Sarah is proposing Yahoo do with Rockmelt.
That's true of Hunch at eBay, though it should also be noted that the new homepage was originally spearheaded by Milo employees, an acquired startup that also is creating new products in eBay (read analyst day reports and look for "eBay Local" for hints).
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yahoo needs talent to succeed. Yahoo, in general, cannot compete with Google, Facebook or smaller startups for talent. They're better off now than they were prior to Marissa but they're still a definite second best. So they are buying talent to stock the shelves with first rate devs and leaders - mostly in mobile. At some point - say in 6 - 18 more months - talent may come to work for them to work with some of these…
This article might disagree with you: Yahoo Keeps Buying Startups That Don't Make Their Own Apps http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/yahoo-qwiki-lawsuit-chaotic-...
Oh my. Yahoo has lots of problems with execution, we shouldn't be surprised if due diligence is another example, especially when they think they're in the 11th hour.
Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st
#80I think a lot of this is a side-effect of it being socially unacceptable to have 10x (or more) pay differences between good and bad employees at tech companies. That sort of thing is tolerated on Wall Street, but not SV.
Prediction: SV business leaders will find a way to meaningfully tie pay to performance more than they currently can, and offer the best 3-5x what the average earn.
The current system is just too roundabout.