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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

#371

Post by Dylan16807 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #365
Dylan16807 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

This wasn't an acquisition, but it was really close to one. Whether or not the laws cover it right now, expanding acquisition laws into hiring out the core of a company would not be a big expansion. It wouldn't be a sea change in what types of hiring the FTC has control over.

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

#372

Post by slashdave »

stephen_cagle wrote: post #246

I wonder if a simpler solution to all this regulartion would be something like imposing a tax (fee?) when larger companies acquire smaller companies? So something like, "For every order of magnitude difference between the acquirer and the aquiree, there will be a 100% tax on the acquisition price paid to the US Federal government." So this would basically encourage companies to either have their own IPO (no fee at al…

How is that simpler? I am already confused

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

#373

Post by AnthonyMouse »

JustExAWS wrote: post #366
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a market where there are only a small handful of incumbents and then a bunch of precarious cash-strapped startups, the incumbents collude with each other so that they only have to outbid the startups. The startups, meanwhile, are at a disadvantage because e.g. the incumbents control search engine rankings or app distribution channels, which lowers their competitiveness and therefore the amount they can afford pay to employees in competition with the incumbents. The incumbents are then the high bidder even while offering something less than they would have had to in the alternative.

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

#374

Post by duped »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #359
benreesman wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely proves that she was right. If you care about market cap? She was right. If you care about employee comp? She was right. If you care about consumer choice, she was right. Number of listings, new potential acquirers for your startup, more diverse office geography, right right right right. The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and…

> The idea that there's a significant lobby on fucking Hacker News unhappy that a startup IPO'd for a zillion bucks and made everyone rich is twilight zone shit. It makes no sense according to the stated values in the fucking masthead. Blocking the merger was good. But I'm not convinced the IPO was good. I think trying to be a company that's worth tens of billions of dollars is only going to make Figma worse. I care…

I mean the bigger problem with the IPO was that they opened at a 20b valuation and by the end of the day a bunch of investors got richer than anyone who built anything because the investment bankers left 30+ billion in valuation on the table for their buddies

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

#375

Post by JustExAWS »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #371
JustExAWS wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This wasn't an acquisition, but it was really close to one. Whether or not the laws cover it right now, expanding acquisition laws into hiring out the core of a company would not be a big expansion. It wouldn't be a sea change in what types of hiring the FTC has control over.

So now you want companies to seek government approval before they can hire a certain number of people from a company? What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?

Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want the government to restrict who can be hired from a company or better yet, whether employees can accept better offers from another company? That’s only the other side of the coin of restricting employee movement based on non competes.

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

#376

Post by benreesman »

JustExAWS wrote: post #365
Dylan16807 wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It's not about restrictions on hiring, you keep repeating that even though no one has advanced that proposal in the whole thread. You have absolutely crushed that strawman argument, congratulations.

It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historically been kept out of the courts for the most part because for the most part it has been in everyone's interests to keep the wheels greased on this (you'll notice old school VCs like Khosla are against fucking around in it in public forums).

Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal. At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".

If the trend becomes to just dissolve a startup the minute its worth anything and immediately partition it into exactly the pieces a giant company wants and zero out everyone else, this will have a massively destabilizing effect on a historical engine of innovation (see: OGs are against it on Twitter).

And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.

Stop talking about the government restricting hiring, no one said that.

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

#377

Post by aprilthird2021 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #293
benreesman wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I have heard that sentiment too. I've never heard so much as a second-hand anecdote that someone was on the track of an acquisition but got the vibe their 50 million dollar acquihire plus was going to just be too much trouble under an activist chairwoman though. It seems to me that the same weaponization of binary tribal thinking in red/blue social stuff has a corollary in "entrepeneur / commie" oversimplificat…

It just happened with Windsurf and Google.

You think Google could have but didn't acquire Windsurf, and instead hired away the top talent and discarded the rest because of regulatory scrutiny?

Is there any proof of this at all?

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

#378

Post by Dylan16807 »

JustExAWS wrote: post #375
Dylan16807 wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This wasn't an acquisition, but it was really close to one. Whether or not the laws cover it right now, expanding acquisition laws into hiring out the core of a company would not be a big expansion. It wouldn't be a sea change in what types of hiring the FTC has control over.

So now you want companies to seek government approval before they can hire a certain number of people from a company? What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer? Who exactly does that benefit? Not the employees. Maybe the investors? Do you really want…

> seek government approval before

There's a neighboring comment that used almost the exact same wording that I already replied to.

In short: No.

> What if Google wanted to hire me and 3 buddies from our startup but didn’t want to hire the secretary or more realistically they only needed the backend developers. But didn’t care about hiring the web developer?

Is your startup like 10 people? Worth much less than a billion dollars? Then it's not big enough to be a problem.

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

#379

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

benreesman wrote: post #376
JustExAWS wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not about restrictions on hiring, you keep repeating that even though no one has advanced that proposal in the whole thread. You have absolutely crushed that strawman argument, congratulations. It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity" in a company: a much fuzzier area with much less clear established stare decis: companies very rarely litigate such cases, it's an area that has historic…

The government caused the problem in the first place by making it harder for big companies to acquire smaller companies.

> It's about the property rights or lack thereof attached to "equity"

An employer has never had “property rights” to decide where I can and can’t work.

> Everyone would agree that if a giant public company sold itself to the CEO's cousin for a handful of glass beads and declared the existing shares worthless, that would be flat illegal

The CEO while working for the company has a fiduciary responsibility to the company. But doesn’t have the responsibility not to leave if another company offers it more money or if other employees that like the CEO, they are free to reach out to the CEO and leave too.

> At the other end of the spectrum we have startup stock options and RSUs and shit, much less negotiable. But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something".

“Equity” in startups have always statistically been fools gold between dilution, preferred shares, etc.

> But the unwritten contract has pretty much always been roughly "if anyone gets rich, everyone gets something"*

See previous comments about only the naive or true believers (but I repeat myself they are one in the same) are naive enough to believe in anything promised or implied by startups more than you will get paid X amount in cash for hours you work (and sometimes not even that).

> And if the Valley can't figure it out in the family? Then we can dust off the law books, because the courts and regulators and maybe legislators will have to get involved.

So the solution is for the government to pass more laws to fix the problems that the regulations it already put in place caused?

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

#380

Post by raw_anon_1111 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #373
JustExAWS wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In a market where there are only a small handful of incumbents and then a bunch of precarious cash-strapped startups, the incumbents collude with each other so that they only have to outbid the startups. The startups, meanwhile, are at a disadvantage because e.g. the incumbents control search engine rankings or app distribution channels, which lowers their competitiveness and therefore the amount they can afford pay…

The startups in question weren’t building apps or advertising on Google. The entire reason most startups exist is to get acquired or acquire hired.
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