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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

#91

Post by badclient »

nostrademons wrote: post #84
darkarmani wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

False dichotomy if there ever was one.

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

#92

Post by Pxtl »

nilved wrote: post #82
unknownian wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard they finally gave Flickr some TLC and Meyer is looking to revive it... Too bad I already migrated away a long time ago.

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

#93

Post by revelation »

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…

Devils advocate would be of course that you are buying a team that didn't execute, and paying a lot of premium on it.

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

#94

Post by nostrademons »

revelation wrote: post #93
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…

Devils advocate would be of course that you are buying a team that didn't execute , and paying a lot of premium on it.

I think that to get on the radar screen for acquihires, you have to have had at least some success executing, i.e. you launched a product that is usable. You may not have launched the right product, you may have failed to find a market, but it shows that you can build something and deliver it to the public.

There are many teams, particularly in big companies, that fail to do even that.

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

#95

Post by rdouble »

nostrademons wrote: post #94
revelation wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devils advocate would be of course that you are buying a team that didn't execute , and paying a lot of premium on it.

I think that to get on the radar screen for acquihires, you have to have had at least some success executing, i.e. you launched a product that is usable. You may not have launched the right product, you may have failed to find a market, but it shows that you can build something and deliver it to the public. There are many teams, particularly in big companies, that fail to do even that.

Weren't there a half dozen Facebook acquihires where the company hadn't launched any product at all? A former coworker coined them "fist-bump acquisitions" because the defining characteristic was that one of the founders was always a former roommate of Zuck or other early employee.

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

#96

Post by nostrademons »

rdouble wrote: post #95
nostrademons wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that to get on the radar screen for acquihires, you have to have had at least some success executing, i.e. you launched a product that is usable. You may not have launched the right product, you may have failed to find a market, but it shows that you can build something and deliver it to the public. There are many teams, particularly in big companies, that fail to do even that.

Weren't there a half dozen Facebook acquihires where the company hadn't launched any product at all? A former coworker coined them "fist-bump acquisitions" because the defining characteristic was that one of the founders was always a former roommate of Zuck or other early employee.

Possibly, and if that's the case those were probably pretty stupid acquisitions for the company. (And arguably Zuck not doing his fiduciary duty.)

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

#97

Post by ghshephard »

nilkn wrote: post #87
ghshephard wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's important to recognize that there are at least Five (5) parties involved in an acquihire. You have the Acquiring Company, You have the Investors in the Acquired Company, You have the Founders of the acquired Company, You have the employees of the acquired company and, you have the employees of the acquiring company.

All of these parties come into the mix in an acquihire.

The investors have preferred shares, quite often with a liquidation preference, and they will always get something. The founders will often get something, (though in the case of liquidation preferences, it may not be very much - "consulting bonus" is not uncommon here) in an acquhire. The employees of an acquihired may or may not get totally screwed on their common shares depending on the size of the liquidation preference of the investors. They will almost always get a "retention bonus" - that may be on the order of a 50% of their salary, repayable if they don't stick around for 1-2 years.

All companies I've worked with have been pretty good about leveling salaries, and are careful to avoid a situation in which you have two groups of people doing the same job, but one group making 50% more than another. You may have isolated situations in which an employee or two is out of wack on their compensation, but companies like Yahoo! try hard to avoid having systemic disfunction in compensation. The mechanisms for getting new employees in a tight job market come in the form of hiring bonuses and/or acquihires.

Reading your comment carefully, I think you are considering the scenario of an acquhired where most of the employees acquired were founders, whereas I'm thinking of the 30-50 employee company, where only a couple of the employees were founders.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] »

_greim_ wrote: post #61
jusben1369 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yahoo needs talent to succeed. Yahoo, in general, cannot compete with Google, Facebook or smaller startups for talent. They're better off now than they were prior to Marissa but they're still a definite second best. So they are buying talent to stock the shelves with first rate devs and leaders - mostly in mobile. At some point - say in 6 - 18 more months - talent may come to work for them to work with some of these…

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.

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by weisser »

Pxtl wrote: post #92
nilved wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've heard they finally gave Flickr some TLC and Meyer is looking to revive it... Too bad I already migrated away a long time ago.

What did you migrate to?

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

#100

Post by joeblau »

ForrestN wrote: post #27

Does anyone have any real insight into the strategy behind all of these acquisitions? Apart from blasé speculation about acqui-hiring (for what products?) and supposition that Yahoo executives are merely stupid, I'd be interested to understand the broader pattern. It's a real news story, and something is going on. There is a strategy. What is it?

I think Yahoo just needs great engineers and acqui-hiring is a good way to get them quickly. I think that as long as Yahoo can keep the teams together, they have a good shot of building some great tools.

If I was to guess their strategy: Sumly + Tumblr + Rockmelt looks like a new content distribution system.

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