391–400 of 451 posts
I think the FTC was spot on with the Adobe-Figma merger, but there were quite a few other mergers they either prevented, tried to prevent, or were regretful about not preventing, where that was a very bad decision.
If you arrest everybody who "looks guilty", you'll eventually end up arresting a criminal. That isn't a reason to celebrate. I think the FTC was spot on with the Adobe-Figma merger, but there were quite a few other mergers they either prevented, tried to prevent, or were regretful about not preventing, where that was a very bad decision.
I think a dramatic redesign of the M&A system needs to occur.
For example, I think a merger/acquisition ban for companies of a medium to large size could be an effective design of our corporate system. Most medium to large sized companies make acquisitions and mergers out of convenience and a desire to thin out competition rather than any sort of business need.
A company like Apple or Google or perhaps even a much smaller one should be disallowed from acquiring companies or being a part of a merger from the standpoint that they are sufficiently large as an entity.
Examples like the Apple acquisition of DarkSky and Beats or Google’s purchase of Nest represent companies who clearly have sufficient resources to build a competitor and new entrant to the market internally, but out of the economics of the arguably lazy M&A shortcut they are allowed to buy competitors and remove choice from the market to the detriment of both customers and the labor market.
In short, we’ve just accepted the base assumption that companies are allowed to buy each other at all and that entire concept is worth questioning.
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No, the argument is that Adobe willing to pay a high price is a good signal that Figma was not a dice roll but actually worth much more than Adobe was willing to pay.
If it was known that Figma was worth more than Adobe was willing to pay, then why did Figma take the deal?
Whether the government saw Adobe's willingness to overpay for Figma as a signal of Adobe's underlying incentives (as in "I acquire Figma to keep my monopoly" and not "I acquire Figma to vertically integrate and make better product for consumer") seems much harder to speculate on. I didn't explain (nor do I think there's an obvious explanation) for why the original deal was at the high price rather than the low price, but I'd imagine Figma would've been generally willing to sell for less than the price Adobe bid given Adobe was probably Figma's best customer for acquiry.
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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…
No one has proposed that anyone be barred from taking an offer of employment (that I've seen and interpreted that way anyways), that would be extremely unpopular with just about everyone.
What people are talking about is whether or not founders and VCs can de facto sell a company in terms of the real assets that people care about without distributing the proceeds to shareholders via a legal fiction that the one company disappeared (was written down or otherwise disposed of) and tada over here some job offers and other compensation appeared in just that amount but for a different group of people.
This is a plot device in the Sorkin film about Facebook. They're in Thiel's office getting the new investment and the numbers guy is like "we're going to get you clean paperwork in Delaware" and Thiel looks up: "So who, exactly, is Eduardo Saverin?" I very much doubt the movie was a terribly accurate portrayal, but that's the TLDR for lay people: one company vanishes, another appears with the same assets, but different ownership.
Trying to make this about the federal government telling people they can't work for Google is bad faith. Stop with that shit.
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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…
The property rights in question are the rights of the people who hold equity in the company. The legally unclear part because of inadequate precedent to know how a given case would be adjudicated in a given jurisdiction is what exactly "equity" means in the context of employee ownership in a technology startup (which gets different treatment of e.g. taxes and amortization schedules, "tech" is treated differently by t…
The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
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The property rights in question are the rights of the people who hold equity in the company. The legally unclear part because of inadequate precedent to know how a given case would be adjudicated in a given jurisdiction is what exactly "equity" means in the context of employee ownership in a technology startup (which gets different treatment of e.g. taxes and amortization schedules, "tech" is treated differently by t…
The founders are employees too. Should they not be allowed to leave a company because they are founders? The entire scenario is that the investors aren’t getting anything because the company isn’t being acquired and the employees are being “poached”. The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them owing money to former employees.
Enough with this, it's trolling at this point.
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The founders are employees too. Should they not be allowed to leave a company because they are founders? The entire scenario is that the investors aren’t getting anything because the company isn’t being acquired and the employees are being “poached”. The founders are making the choice that their equity in the company is worth less (not worthless) than the offer they are getting from their new employee.
In the hypothetical lawsuit the damages would be money, the defendants would be the founders and investors, and the plantiffs would be employees with grants that got written down. No one knows how such a lawsuit would play out because it hasn't happened and looks unlikely to. For the fucking hard of thinking: it would not be about an injunction against the founders being able to work at Google. It would be about them…
I get an offer from Google where I am now making real money and have liquid RSUs coming. You think other employees should have the right to sue me because I left the company for a better offer?
The investors aren’t getting anything, in this case Google didn’t acquire the company, they hired the employees. Why would the investors be sued because employees left?
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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 lashing she gets around here is disturbing.
Chairwoman Born was right about everything (natch) and we got a modest crisis to prove that almost immediately afterwards with the Russian sovereign debt default and a society-changing crisis in 2008 (same OTC derivatives contracts right down to the flawed VAR methodology).
If we had let Ms. Born do her job as she was so clearly and eminemtly equipped and prepared to do it, you get an alternate history. We're probably sitting here on twenty years of budget surplus, carbon goals getting lined up and knocked down like clockwork, a well-run Internet living up to its potential, and two generations coming of age in Boomer-style optimism and prosperity instead of cynical hopelessness. There's probably no fentanyl crisis to speak of and Putin gets a nervous palsy just thinking about displeasung NATO.
God knows what the price will be this time.
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> 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 billi…
So what laws do you suggest that the government pass that both stop Google from offering me a highly skilled and sought after AI professional (not really, we are speaking hypothetically) or my team and don’t suppress my ability to make as much money as the market will give me?
But if it's the entire team, and that team is the backbone of a company, and acquiring that company would be blocked by the government, all three of those things, then your income is already being suppressed by not allowing acquisitions. Sorry about that, but the extra boost you'd get during monopoly forming would only be temporary anyway. In the long term it's better for both employees and customers to avoid too much consolidation. Extending that rule to stop team buyouts will have almost no effect on the status quo. It's allowing the team buyouts that could potentially change the status quo, and it would be a change for the worse.
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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. Imagi…
> They were killed by foundational technology shifts that were orthogonal to the industry. That's the point. Markets aren't stagnant. When changes happen, monopolies are susceptible to being unseated.
America experienced uncheck monopolies during the Gilded Age. Most thought that rapid industrialization, economic growth, and technological advances would have resulted in enough competition to create an economic utopia. Instead, even while the United States experienced a surge in wealth and prosperity, the underlying reality of political corruption, social inequality, and labor unrest created a nasty, brutish existence that was only solved when the Trust Busting Roosevelt's transformed America by breaking up the monopolies.
If you like free market capitalism you can't be in favor of monopolies, and if you dont want monopolies you need STRONG enforcement of antitrust M&A regulation. We are well past a correction since Regan stopped antitrust enforcement. I would argue that all of our political chaos since the 1980's can be traced primarily back to that single decision.