[deleted]
Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
11–20 of 93 posts
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#12> Eero may have been first to mesh WiFi, but competition came fast. Multiple companies including Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the next year.
Huh? Meraki had a mesh WiFi product out at least five years before this. How am I supposed to trust the rest of the article if the author can’t do basic fact checking?
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#13For what it’s worth, this is what a fire sale / acqui-hire looks like for a large-ish hardware company. Were investors and early employees screwed? Sure. But these execs could likely have gotten similar payouts over similar timeframes by simply jumping ship. As for Eero the company? Sounds like it was dead. I don’t want to sound like I’m justifying this kind of behavior. But the main deceptive thing is calling this a…
The issue is founders won regardless of which side the coin landed on and the employees got screwed. I hope stories like this continue to break, and potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Everyone got "screwed" on equity, including the founders. Separately Amazon decided to set up packages for employees they thought were to valuable to lose. If an early employee was valuable enough they were probably included in the 10 who received it.
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#14This really makes me feel for the employees and extremely distrustful of stock-option focused payouts.
We need more transparency as well as good willed founders willing to pledge and honor more equitable systems for themselves, investors and employees.
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#15I don't understand what people expect in this kind of situation. The company was bought for around the amount of money that they took in investment, or less. Why would the employees get anything? If preference didn't exist, and I could take $10M in investment at $100M in valuation, and then the next day liquidate the company, return $1M, and keep $9M, obviously that would just mean that nobody would invest in startups any more.
Does it piss people off that the execs got retention bonuses? You've got to give the execs some incentive to stay around if you want to keep operating the company. Do people expect execs to work out of the goodness of their hearts?
The company failed. That means the stock isn't valuable. What is hard about this?
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#16> Eero may have been first to mesh WiFi, but competition came fast. Multiple companies including Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the next year. Huh? Meraki had a mesh WiFi product out at least five years before this. How am I supposed to trust the rest of the article if the author can’t do basic fact checking?
It's implied that this is in the context of the consumer market. Mashable has probably never heard of Meraki.
(Although another explanation is that the tech press generally doesn't remember anything that happened more than a year ago.)
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is founders won regardless of which side the coin landed on and the employees got screwed. I hope stories like this continue to break, and potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Everyone got "screwed" on equity, including the founders. Separately Amazon decided to set up packages for employees they thought were to valuable to lose. If an early employee was valuable enough they were probably included in the 10 who received it.
I have been involved in M&A activity, and when we (owners) bought a failed competitor for clients and assets, we wiped out the owners (who had misstated some financial factors of importance) and made the employees whole (who had all been stiffed on pay). We didn’t have to, but it was the right thing to do.
Everyone has different morals and ethics I suppose.
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue is founders won regardless of which side the coin landed on and the employees got screwed. I hope stories like this continue to break, and potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.
I don't think that's the right way to think about it. Everyone got "screwed" on equity, including the founders. Separately Amazon decided to set up packages for employees they thought were to valuable to lose. If an early employee was valuable enough they were probably included in the 10 who received it.
I am so confused, were the owners just idiots about judging the value of the sale?
There is no reason that all the stockholders should have voted to approve this sale unless they were going to walk away with something to pad their pockets so... did some majority shareholder sell out to amazon and get some separate remuneration? I feel like that should definitely be illegal.
Edit: Oh, so the founders assumed they'd be acqui-hired and got screwed over after screwing over all the regular employees. Okay I'm totally fine with that.
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#19> Eero may have been first to mesh WiFi, but competition came fast. Multiple companies including Luma and NetGear launched similar products in the next year. Huh? Meraki had a mesh WiFi product out at least five years before this. How am I supposed to trust the rest of the article if the author can’t do basic fact checking?
meraki is subscription service, not a product that people own. Once your subscription is over, its a paperweight.
Re: Amazon bought Eero for $97M and employees still got screwed
#20For what it’s worth, this is what a fire sale / acqui-hire looks like for a large-ish hardware company. Were investors and early employees screwed? Sure. But these execs could likely have gotten similar payouts over similar timeframes by simply jumping ship. As for Eero the company? Sounds like it was dead. I don’t want to sound like I’m justifying this kind of behavior. But the main deceptive thing is calling this a…
The issue is founders won regardless of which side the coin landed on and the employees got screwed. I hope stories like this continue to break, and potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.
>potential startup employees internalize the economic reality of working at a startup.
Treat your salary as your total income and equity as a lottery ticket?