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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

#401

Post by Dylan16807 »

terminalshort wrote: post #387
Dylan16807 wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

But companies should be able to pull things like this. If a company isn't paying market rate I see no problem with a competitor destroying it by hiring away all its best employees.

If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem.

In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

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

#402

Post by scarface_74 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #399
raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

They can give just you a job at any time. 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 bot…

So they just give me a job as the leader, then other people want to follow. Is it them illegal for Google to offer other former coworkers a job? Isn’t that kind of like the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”?

So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off?

Am I paying more for search today because of the monopoly? Am I paying more for any of the free stuff that Google has because of advertising (that I block anyway)?

In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?

Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?

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

#403

Post by prasoon2211 »

As others have said, this is classic selection-effect. Lina Khan isn't coming out and telling people about

- the companies that died because acquiring them was too much of a hassle

- the companies that died or never got funded / started because the investors couldn't see and exit path

- the companies that got acquired piecemeal (Windsurf, Inflection), leaving the early employees with NOTHING simply to avoid the ire of anti-trust hawks at the FTC. This has irreversibly damaged the SV bargain - early startup employees work hard in case of an acquisition, they get rich.

So Lina Khan can keep patting her own back but there's a reason founders, early-stage startup employees and investors disagree.

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

#404

Post by scarface_74 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #401
terminalshort wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But companies should be able to pull things like this. If a company isn't paying market rate I see no problem with a competitor destroying it by hiring away all its best employees.

If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem. In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

There was no world where Windsurf was going to challenge Google and the same is true for the examples.

These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google.

Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people. Even then they only wanted the best people.

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

#405

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #402
Dylan16807 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can give just you a job at any time. 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 bot…

So they just give me a job as the leader, then other people want to follow. Is it them illegal for Google to offer other former coworkers a job? Isn’t that kind of like the “Prisoner’s Dilemma”? So exactly how does a Google “monopoly” (which definitely doesn’t exist in AI if anywhere), harm customers? And would I as a potential employee better off or worse off? Am I paying more for search today because of the monopol…

Just offering normal jobs would generally be fine, doing a big group deal that also comes with IP licensing would generally not be fine.

I'm not going to try to give you the exact line.

> In other words, you do want the government to force employees to stay at a company when they could get a better offer?

> Isn’t that what we wanted to prevent with outlawing non competes?

That's way too general. You could use that same argument to say acquisitions should never be blocked.

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

#406

Post by Dylan16807 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #404
Dylan16807 wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a competitor gets too big and is using its money to remove competition before it can be challenged, that's a problem. In normal competitive situations this rule wouldn't apply. If one company wants the assets and employees of another company they can go ahead and buy it. And any company can offer better jobs as plain old jobs. The negotiation here was not just some high end job openings.

There was no world where Windsurf was going to challenge Google and the same is true for the examples. These were regular old job offers. At any time, any of the employees could have stayed at Windsurf instead of taking a lot more money from Google. Google didn’t want the “assets”. Google wanted the people . Even then they only wanted the best people.

> These were regular old job offers.

They were not.

> Google didn’t want the “assets”.

They paid 2.4 billion in licensing fees. Or something like that, looks like part of that was special structured not a regular old job offer money.

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

#407

Post by kaibee »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #343
dabedee wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're hitting the real divide here. 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. Also notable [0]: "[...] in any given year, we see up to 3,000 merger filings that get reported to us. Around 2% of those actually get a second look by the government, so you have 98% of all deals that, for the mos…

> 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…

> 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.

No, we have a problem where 95% of regulations work so well that no one even remembers that they exist (child labor, etc). A media environment that reports on outliers for clicks and corporations that want to dump industrial waste in rivers.

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

#408

Post by mschuster91 »

benreesman wrote: post #291
mschuster91 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who knows how Macromedia would have handled it and maybe it wouldn’t have had to be removed from browsers under Adobe’s watch due to security issues. Flash always was a dumpsterfire, and so were virtually all browser plugins using native code. There's a reason NPAPI was deprecated eventually. The exception of course is ActiveX. There was no way to ever make that shitshow even reasonably safe, simply given how its e…

It was kind of fun watching adult men say the word "ActiveX" out loud and in earnest though. DCOM with Apartment Threading just didn't have that same "Power Rangers Bad Guy" energy.

From a security perspective, ActiveX is a relic from days long past, when people could be reasonably trusted - an assumption that broke around the early '00s when "dialer" malware offered a first way to extract funds from victims.

From a developer perspective, I'm still sad that it went away. The old COM/OLE/ActiveX ecosystem was flexible to a degree nothing has never ever been since.

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

#409

Post by TrackerFF »

aetherson wrote: post #322
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…

Suppose that you have an opportunity to play a game. The game is you roll a fair normal six sided die. If it comes up a 6, you get $60B. If it comes up a 5 or 4 you get $30B. If it comes up 3 or less, you get $0. This is clearly a valuable game! It is worth in expectation $20B. But it also has a 50% chance of being worthless to you. Someone offers to buy it from you for $20B. You agree, giving up some upside for some…

I think the flaw here would be to assume that there's such a great chance (roll 1 -3) of it being worthless. Figma, while not being a mature 20+ year old company, had long since established its place in the market.

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

#410

Post by GreenWatermelon »

prasoon2211 wrote: post #403

As others have said, this is classic selection-effect. Lina Khan isn't coming out and telling people about - the companies that died because acquiring them was too much of a hassle - the companies that died or never got funded / started because the investors couldn't see and exit path - the companies that got acquired piecemeal (Windsurf, Inflection), leaving the early employees with NOTHING simply to avoid the ire o…

> the companies that died because acquiring them was too much of a hassle

So it was a shitty non-viable business

> the companies that died or never got funded / started because the investors couldn't see and exit path

More shitty non-viable business. Creating a company only to sell it and screw over your customers is evil.

Maybe those founders should try to make real businesses, instead of playing glorified rollette.

> the companies that got acquired piecemeal (Windsurf, Inflection), leaving the early employees with NOTHING simply to avoid the ire of anti-trust hawks at the FTC

Plain-old loop hole exploitation. Simple anit-competetive stealth aquihire that isn't called so. My conclusion is that the market needs more regulations.

Does your ideal market only contain 5 or mega-corps that control every aspect of our lives?

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