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Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

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Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#91

Post by abalone »

MCRed wrote: post #42
abalone wrote: post #32

This is actually a good example of how to fumble a decent exit for a struggling app. This was written in April 2014 so we have the benefit of hindsight for evaluating this claim: "I’ve already built an £X million company in this area that was limited to the UK & Ireland; this time it’s global and I can easily get to twice £X million" Based on the number of reviews for roomscan I'm going to guess that getting to "twic…

There was no $2M. They never made a $2M offer. This wasn't even the people in Google that do acquisitions. This was a hiring manager and a HR recruiter tag teaming the guy and pretending like it was about acquisition in order to get him to take their call at a time when he was overloaded with interest from other parties.

$2M was mentioned as the max offer for these types of deals (read: acquihire). They didn't have to get to the point of making an offer; he rejected that maximum.

And $2M is definitely an acquisition.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#92

Post by gargarplex »

MindTwister wrote: post #2

Does anyone have similar experiences with Google?

I had a product launch that went extremely successful, and then someone from Google approached me via an email with an ambiguous messaging; i.e., "We're from Google and we want to talk to you". I thought they wanted to buy me out, but instead they just wanted to convince me to apply for a job interview.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#93

Post by potatolicious »

mojuba wrote: post #54
potatolicious wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The accelerometer and gyroscope. The double integral of acceleration is displacement. On iPhones/iOS it's extremely accurate to the point where you can integrate displacement from it and not be far off from the real result - over short timespans/distances anyways. One of the lesser-appreciated qualities of Apple hardware (more accurately, hardware and drivers) is the quality and accuracy of their sensors.

> The double integral of acceleration is displacement. Have you actually tried this? I have and the results were totally unusably off. If the accelerometer that costs a few dollars at best could be that precise, you'd see thousands and thousands of new apps that would use it in creative ways. It's just from my experience you can't calculate displacement using an accelerometer that cheap and therefore you don't see iP…

> "It's just from my experience you can't calculate displacement using an accelerometer that cheap "

I disagree. You clearly can - the app and the people who use it are proof positive of the sensor's capabilities. Having seen the raw output from these sensors a few times they're also startlingly accurate.

The problem is of course that it's not simple and there's real complexity in the solution. It's (of course) impossible if you blindly take the double integral of raw accelerometer readings.

In the same way we do all kinds of magical things with all kinds of sensors - but it's rarely as simple as plugging a pin into a ADC and reading the bits that come out.

Signal processing, in both hardware and software, is a gigantic field of study unto itself. I fully expect that the app is doing something non-trivial with its sensor readings to gain accuracy - but it's eminently possible, just difficult.

The intersection of "mobile app developer" with "skilled signals engineer" is pretty low. If someone capable wrote a library that did this, you'd bet that we'd see an explosion of apps that use this functionality.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#94

Post by spott »

wuliwong wrote: post #52
borski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$2M isn't really $2M. Spread it out over 4 years as $300k the first year, $400k the second, $500k the third, $800k the fourth. This is what's called 'golden handcuffs.' If he truly believed RoomScan could be a massive success and the market was showing adoption, his expected value is much higher for sticking with RoomScan, especially as he had sold his last company and didn't /need/ a few extra hundred thousand dolla…

I'm not sure how this still isn't two million dollars? I guess if you subtract the salary this person could be making if they paid him $2M up front and let him walk away?

That, and the fact that $2 million over 4 years at ~10% in the stock market is approximately an extra $800k.

Taxes change all that and make things more complicated ($2 million lump sum is taxed more heavily than when it is split up over 4 years). I'm not sure how that works out though.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#95

Post by inerte »

gedrap wrote: post #72
ForHackernews wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if they read your personal Gmail account to see if you're considering other offers? Or if you've corresponded with other people about their proposal?

I don't think anyone at Google can read anyone's emails willy nilly just like that.

There are people who can, every company has them. Usually there are levels, as in "can read number of emails", "can read subjects", up to "can impersonate accounts". Most of the time the mechanism is there for legal reasons. Sometimes people do bad stuff with it.

See https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=google%20David%2...

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#96

Post by vidarh »

wuliwong wrote: post #80
manifesto wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time value of money, which in short summarized as "money available at the present time is worth more than the same amount in the future due to its potential earning capacity." [0] [0] http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/timevalueofmoney.asp

I see what you are saying. But the factor I mentioned I think is more of a loss than the time-value loss. Basically, would you take $2M up front but then no salary for 4 years or $2M spread over four years but you still can earn your salary (which in this case I would assume is at least $150K/year).

I don't see where you get that scenario for. The $2m would be to get him to give up the company, whether or not they intended to take the product further, on the basis that he presumably expected some return on it. It's a hiring bonus. I know people who gotten hiring bonuses well in excess of that without having a company or product to use to justify it.

But in any case: It comes in addition to a salary if they hire him, whether or not the $2m would be paid up front or in tranches, and if they genuinely wanted the product, not to hire him, he'd expect to be able to still earn a salary. In fact, I'd argue that he'd expect to be able to increase his income potential: He'd have a Google acquisition to put on his resume.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#97

Post by bradleyjg »

lukeschlather wrote: post #71
robmcm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was suggesting GPS wouldn't work with most rooms having ceilings. Wifi positioning I would imagine is highly inaccurate, which leaves the gyroscope. Judging by some screenshots and appstore comments I assume its only roughly accurate, and requires you to move your phone slowly between walls in straight lines (not via your pocket or around furniture for example). I think I would have immediately dismissed an idea li…

GPS is based on triangulating (well, trilateralating) between 3-6 fixed points in space located thousands of kilometers away. Wifi positioning is based on triangulating (trilateralating) between 3-40 fixed points within 100 meters. Assuming you can get access to the raw data, Wifi should be extremely accurate for calculating the distance between two points in space separated by less than 30 meters. (And probably pret…

I'd think the problem with wifi is that the exact position of the base stations are hard to collect. The mass proliferation of telcom wifi networks could help if they are willing to sell the location data, but I don't see how Apple could reasonably know where the access points I see with SSID Holly_guest or TS-Dlink are located to use it as a trilateration point.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#98

Post by abalone »

geofft wrote: post #83
ForHackernews wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why it's a scam. Isn't an "aqui-hire" pretty standard practice these days?

An "acqui-hire" is the process of acquiring a team that you know works well together and is capable of putting out a product and probably has relevant domain knowledge, without going through the traditional process of finding generally competent people, throwing them in a room, and seeing if they can get something done. If it's a solo founder, and especially if they're not being recruited to work on a similar sort of…

There's a crucial difference. Acquihires are typically at a much higher price, one reason being that other investors often need to be taken care of for the founder to leave on good terms. The corpdev/recruiter even mentioned $2M as a maximum figure. That's not exactly a typical engineering signing bonus.

Re: Hi, It’s Google Corporate Development

#100

Post by boomzilla »

MCRed wrote: post #41

For a period I was heavily recruited by google. Their recruiters tried a great many variations of attempts to trick me into interviewing for a job. It seems weird that they would do this, because pretty soon, it would become obvious that it was a job interview and nothing more. Maybe there are a lot of talented engineers out there who are doing startups but aren't really committed to them and google manages via the f…

It actually goes both ways. In fact, some start-up people welcome this kind of approaches, because they can turn around and show potential investors/employees that "we are validated by Big Names at Google, come and join us". Hell, I've seen this first hand and it was not even an email, just a passing compliment from some reasonably "big name".

So it's all a game, don't hate the players, hate the rules. It makes it hard to know when someone is legit though. I think that's one reason why investors are over reliant on their networks, as the signal/noise ratio is too low in SV. "Fake it till you make it" is the motto.

However, I don't think I can complain too much. Without all the hypes, we wouldn't have this favorable job market. Not sure how long it's going to last, but at least it's good for now.

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