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Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

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Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#81

Post by MartinMcGirk »

unknownian wrote: post #62
nilved wrote: post #57

Isn't it an immense amount of negative PR to buy an app and shut it down? Why does this keep happening?

You think people actually cared about Rockmelt, the "social web browser"?

I did for quite a while actually. I loved the social browser concept, but the fact that I couldn't get extensions like lastpass to work in Rockmelt killed it for me and drove me back to vanilla Chrome.

I still wished them well though, their product was good and their customer support was great. I'm sad to see the brand go away, but I'm pleased for them that they got acquired. Hopefully they go on to do well at Yahoo!

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#82

Post by nilved »

unknownian wrote: post #62
nilved wrote: post #57

Isn't it an immense amount of negative PR to buy an app and shut it down? Why does this keep happening?

You think people actually cared about Rockmelt, the "social web browser"?

I don't use Rockmelt, but I did use Flickr and delicious. Yahoo is the touch of death for web applications and I've grown to resent their tendency to buy and ruin services I use. This case with Rockmelt is more of the same: I don't use it myself, but the people who do are now less likely to like Yahoo.

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#83

Post by arsenerei »

nostrademons wrote: post #70
_greim_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear with me while I ask a dumb question. Why pay $70M to acquire a startup just for their engineering and technical talent? What's the going rate for a really good engineer nowadays, $150K? Why not just offer $180K? That difference adds up to a lot less than $70M.

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't c…

How do you pronounce acqhire? ack-HIRE?

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#84

Post by nostrademons »

darkarmani wrote: post #75
nostrademons wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't c…

So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?

There are two parts to getting good employees: finding them and getting them to work for you. Many startup employees, by themselves, will not work for Yahoo for $200K/year. Many startup employees will work for Yahoo for $150K/year if all their favorite coworkers are working for Yahoo and they get to work on a product they're familiar with. The only way to bring them over is to bring them over as a block.

Many people in the startup world don't understand this, but the vast majority of people in the labor force are not primarily motivated by money. You need to pay them enough to feel like they're not being taken advantage of, but beyond that, they go for work environment, interesting coworkers, challenging projects, and other intangibles. To have any chance at all of hiring them, you need to provide those and not just money.

(Google understands this very well - they explicitly state with their offer that most people who work for Google do not do so for financial gain. They do it because they want to be a part of something great, and have really intelligent coworkers, and be given a flexible and creative work environment. Yahoo has a big challenge matching this, given their current lackluster stable of products, and Marissa's trying to jump-start the virtuous cycle and bring in folks that people would want to work with.)

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#85

Post by nostrademons »

arsenerei wrote: post #83
nostrademons wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't c…

How do you pronounce acqhire? ack-HIRE?

I pronounce it "Acqui-hire", and I've sometimes seen it spelled that way, but "acquihire" looks wrong to me in print.

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#86

Post by hkmurakami »

hga wrote: post #79
nashequilibrium wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article might disagree with you: Yahoo Keeps Buying Startups That Don't Make Their Own Apps http://readwrite.com/2013/07/03/yahoo-qwiki-lawsuit-chaotic-...

Oh my. Yahoo has lots of problems with execution, we shouldn't be surprised if due diligence is another example, especially when they think they're in the 11th hour.

well considering Yahoo doesn't power their own search engine, maybe they're okay with teams who are adept at creating great UI and UX wrappers around 3rd party licensed technology.

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#87

Post by nilkn »

ghshephard wrote: post #77
darkarmani wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So why not offer $200K and require proof of currently working at X?

It's not fair to your existing employees, so you would end up having to pay all of them more money as well. This gets very expensive very fast. Quite often cheaper just to acquihire and end up paying the engineers (Existing and new) $150K.

This doesn't make any sense since the founders of the company getting acquihired stand to gain a considerable amount of money from the acquisition. They'll still end up getting paid more than existing employees. In fact, they may get a "signing bonus" which exceeds the entire lifetime earnings of the existing employees.

Besides, very few companies are transparent with salaries. If yours is not, that means that salary negotiation is not always fair to existing employees and they don't want you to know that. (It could also mean salary negotiation is unfair to the new hire as well.)

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#88

Post by darkchasma »

arsenerei wrote: post #83
nostrademons wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't c…

How do you pronounce acqhire? ack-HIRE?

I go with ack-Hire because Acui-hire sounds too much like they're being hired from the sea.

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#89

Post by jclos »

hkmurakami wrote: post #86
hga wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh my. Yahoo has lots of problems with execution, we shouldn't be surprised if due diligence is another example, especially when they think they're in the 11th hour.

well considering Yahoo doesn't power their own search engine, maybe they're okay with teams who are adept at creating great UI and UX wrappers around 3rd party licensed technology.

This is actually quite sad considering Yahoo has an excellent research division in Barcelona in information retrieval. Maybe they should start funding them more instead of letting them fund themselves with huge european projects.

Re: Yahoo Has Acquired Rockmelt, Apps To Shut Down On August 31st

#90

Post by badclient »

nostrademons wrote: post #70
_greim_ wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear with me while I ask a dumb question. Why pay $70M to acquire a startup just for their engineering and technical talent? What's the going rate for a really good engineer nowadays, $150K? Why not just offer $180K? That difference adds up to a lot less than $70M.

When you acqhire a startup, you're not just buying the engineers they hired. You're filtering out all the engineers they didn't hire. It takes an enormous amount of work to find that good engineer in the pool of unemployed workers. This is why big companies pay for sourcers, recruiters, referrals, interviewers, etc. In a typical company, that 1 good hire resulted from looking through hundreds of resumes that didn't c…

That's worth a lot more than just the engineers' salaries

I call bs. It's honestly insulting to every Yahoo employee to hear this argument that these guys coming to yahoo via a dying start up are worth several multiples.

Your entire post doesn't even touch upon the fact that most of these companies are failed companies. They aren't exactly companies whose talent created a product that was killing it. Just as you give credit to them being a team, you should also discredit to them failing--not as criticism but to be consistent in trying to value them fairly.

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