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Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

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Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#361

Post by Dylan16807 »

terminalshort wrote: post #336
benreesman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windsurf getting "bought" such that the employees got nothing is a great recent example of why you want Lina Khan seeing to it that a healthy and well-regulated M&A market is in effect. That's precisely the kind of lowbrow shit you can thank her bought and paid for successors for bringing you the next decade's worth of.

No, it really isn't. It's not remotely the FTCs job to regulate that type of thing, and I really don't think you would want it to be. Would you rather have a system where competing companies have to get government approval before extending offers to you? You know who would love that system? Google.

> have to get government approval before

That is not the only form of regulation, and not the form that would be applied here. This would be after the fact, going after companies that try to pull things like this.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#362

Post by Dylan16807 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #311
benreesman wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windsurf getting "bought" such that the employees got nothing is a great recent example of why you want Lina Khan seeing to it that a healthy and well-regulated M&A market is in effect. That's precisely the kind of lowbrow shit you can thank her bought and paid for successors for bringing you the next decade's worth of.

So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people? Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?

> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people?

What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring.

> Isn’t that the same thing

Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring".

And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sorts of situations.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#363

Post by trhway »

JustExAWS wrote: post #355
trhway wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Google and Windsurf > https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how... that looks strange to me to say the least - a company A's leadership leases completely away the company A's IP to a company B while at the same time getting fat employment offers from the same company B. If it were in Russia i'd say it is a bribe/kickback while in US it looks suspiciously like a huge conflict of interests. How no r…

Huge conflict of interest for who? It was a private company who only had a fiduciary responsibility to its investors and the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor. There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.

>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor

actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ...

>There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.

that has no relation to the current discussion.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#364

Post by AnthonyMouse »

benreesman wrote: post #350
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention that they can't admit when it works, even when the evidence is staring them in the face. We have a problem where regulators are bad at their jobs most of the time, and then people develop the heuristic that all regulation is bad. You need some rules to price major externalities. Not minor externalities, because regulatory overhead and enforceme…

Your whole comment is good but I want to signal boost the most important point you made. Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient . Take the worst DMV office in the world and put it in charge of something way more important than license plates.

> Private cartels are just bad governments with even less accountability or incentive to be efficient.

It's kind of six of one, half a dozen of the other. You can't vote out a monopolist, but unless there is a law against competing with them, there is a threshold for how bad they can get before somebody actually does. The problem is that threshold can be way past the point of anywhere you want to be.

Whereas governments can get even worse because if you resist their unreasonableness they declare you a criminal and resort to violence and you can't go to the police because they are the police. Voting can mitigate this, but there are governments without democracy, democratic governments that are structurally insulated from accountability in practice (see US incumbency rate and Congress abdicating its role to unelected regulatory bureaucrats), and even in a pure direct democracy you still have two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

What you want is neither of these things.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#365

Post by JustExAWS »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #362
JustExAWS wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people? Isn’t that the sane thing we (rightfully) criticized Apple, Google, Adobe and a few other companies for doing in the Jobs era when they had an anti poaching agreement?

> So now you think the government should stop companies from hiring people? What do you mean "now"? That's a major part of what it means to regulate acquisitions. So yes they should continue to regulate this extremely narrow slice of hiring. > Isn’t that the same thing Only if we oversimplify the scenario all the way down to "hiring". And if we do that, there's thousands of laws that prevent hiring people in all sort…

It wasn’t an acquisition - Google offered the employees they wanted a shit ton of cash to leave.

What laws keep companies from hiring people they want to hire who are legally allowed to work in the country?

This is exactly what Google did, it hired employees.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#366

Post by JustExAWS »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #357
scarface_74 wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because you don’t like companies being able to pay people more money?

Companies get money from workers (i.e. customers), pay some back to workers (employees), and keep the rest as profit (or waste it on some kind of bureaucratic inefficiency). Workers can get more money by either paying less as customers or getting paid more as employees. Monopolies screw them on both ends. Customers pay more because there are fewer suppliers, and then employees make less because there is less competit…

The fact is though in this scenario Google paid the employees more and in what tech area is Google a “monopoly”?

The fact that Google did “poach” employees means that there wasn’t an agreement not to.

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#367

Post by JustExAWS »

trhway wrote: post #363
JustExAWS wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huge conflict of interest for who? It was a private company who only had a fiduciary responsibility to its investors and the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor. There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.

>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ... >There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the m…

I am well aware of anti poaching agreements between partners or consulting agencies and clients. I am currently working for a consulting company (full time) and in the past I was an employee at AWS ProServe.

The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach.

I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff augmentation.

Neither is the case here

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#368

Post by npunt »

bobthepanda wrote: post #360
akudha wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people are so ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention These are people who are ideologically opposed to any regulatory intervention? How can such an extreme position even begin to make sense? This is like letting boxers (or MMA fighters) fight in the ring without a referee, isn't it? As it is, there are lax rules that are getting even more relaxed by the day and even those lax rules aren't enforced…

> big businesses and those with money There are obviously the people in this cohort and there are also the people who think they will be in this cohort, who think they will be the victors in a cartel-like world. Heck, before layoffs and the threat of AI started concentrating even more power into tech leadership there were plenty of tech folks along for the ride as the high paid, in demand workforce benefiting from th…

Yeah, many people on HN act like temporarily embarrassed monopolists, ala Steinbeck [1]

[1] https://margins.app/america-and-americans-and-select/w/f395d...

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#369

Post by trhway »

JustExAWS wrote: post #367
trhway wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ... >There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the m…

I am well aware of anti poaching agreements between partners or consulting agencies and clients. I am currently working for a consulting company (full time) and in the past I was an employee at AWS ProServe. The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach. I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff aug…

It isn't about poaching. It is about how vigorously you'd be protecting the interests of your company A in a deal with company B when simultaneously negotiating your personal offer with the company B, especially if it is [even if just implicitly] packaged together i.e. "the offer happens only if the deal happens." You don't see a conflict of interests here?

Re: Lina Khan points to Figma IPO as vindication of M&A scrutiny

#370

Post by digitaltrees »

refurb wrote: post #79
digitaltrees wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Her point is that m&a isn’t the best thing for the economy or founders. Unchecked m&a creates cannibal capitalism where one mega zombie firm scoops up all competition.

Yet there are plenty of examples of monopoly or near monopoly businesses getting their butts handed to them by startups. Yahoo, BlackBerry, Kodak, Nokia, Sears. So it’s clearly not “once you have a monopoly it’s game over for competition”. Markets aren’t stagnant, and as they change it provides opportunities for new competitors to do that “new thing” better than the monopolies.

With the exception of yahoo (which is still a large company I should note), None of those examples were killed by a start up competitor. They were killed by foundational technology shifts that were orthogonal to the industry. Yahoo, is the closest example with google, but kind of proves Kahns point in that a competitor they tried to buy—-google—- refused to be acquired and then innovated them out of the market. Imagine how much worse the world would have been if yahoo bought google and mothballed it. Blackberry and Kodak were both put out of business by apple which was a computer and software company not a phone or camera company. Sears was bought buy Edward Lampert, an private equity bro that fancied himself the next Warren Buffet but in the end gutted it by selling it for parts to keep the cash for himself
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