That's the mistake in your reasoning. The money makes a talent acquisition significantly different from getting a job.
Not chump change by any means, but skilled engineers in Silicon Valley can easily make $250K/year in total compensation. If a startup takes about 3 years of ramen wages to come to fruition and then the founders are locked up for another year while they vest, the plain old employee will have made about $1M in the time that the startup founder made maybe $2.5M. Startup founder is still ahead, but they took on all the risk of their startup failing and them getting nothing, and the difference is only about a factor of 2 instead of an order of magnitude.
How do talent acquisitions happen? Do they usually start with exploring partnership opportunities?
You shouldn't assume anything about what your job duties will be in a big company, even if it's written into your contract. Big companies have an internal logic that often makes no sense to the outside world, and usually depends upon what the decision makers are paying attention to at the moment. Priorities change.
Why not just offer the people that you like multi-million dollar signing bonuses and have them join you. But what if they want to stay in the company and believe in their product, you say. Well if that were the case why would they agree for their company to be acquired in a deal that shuts down their service?
I don't know, I must be missing something.
For some people, they have a demonstrated level of competence which allows them to work on what ever they are passionate about. If that is combined with a modest disregard for money such that they work somewhere because they are passionate, and for any salary as long as it meets some base level. If you want to hire them it is effectively impossible.
You have recruiters call them, they brush them off. You invite them to conferences and schmooze them with all the great things going on at BigCorp and they thank you politely for the invite and don't call back. You shower them with flattery, gifts, whatever and they persistently ignore you.
But if they get passionate about an idea and start a company around it and work day and night to breathe life in it, and more importantly take outside money, then BigCorp gets a chance. If BigCorp can convince the investor(s) to sell them the company they can move this thing you are passionate about into their company and have this star entrepreneur follow it.
Then there is a somewhat less sensational side, you've started a company and you've convinced people to invest, people who are now your friends, and it hasn't turned out quite the way you hoped it might. Perhaps the timing is off, or there was some gotcha you thought would be insignificant but turned out to be much more difficult, or maybe someone turned up a patent or something that makes your idea impossible to implement. Maybe its as simple as customers are willing to pay you what you need to make in order for you idea to be a viable business. You've got talent, you demonstrated an ability to execute, but your investors aren't going to come in on another round of funding because they, like you, no the concept as planned is dead.
You are friends with these folks (your investors) and you don't want to screw that up, so if BigCorp comes along and buys the company which pays off the investors, you get to keep your friendships intact, BigCorp gets to put some golden shackles on you for some period of time, and you get to try again after the shackles come off.
The short of it is that its rarely successful for a large corporation to 'poach' employees by luring them away with promises of better pay and more regular working hours.
Citation needed.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/TRYntzWLJ7Q
It literally says: "You don't have to worry about other people seeing what you posted, not that random person from school, not Google"
It will be interesting if you can post in a year or so about what it was like going to work for Google as a talent acquisition in a related space to your own startup (i.e. what was better and what was different). I'm sure the food will be an improvement, but it will be interesting to hear how it was learning to use the google internal deployment environment (in general, non-NDA terms).
Also, thank you so much for extending data availability on frid.ge until the end of the summer!
Edit: The Techcrunch article [1] states that the company as a whole was acquired, in this particular case. However, how do these deals work out for investors when the company is not acquired, but the entire team quits and joins Google? Note, this is seemingly what occurred with YC Summer 08 company Scoopler yesterday, as mentioned in the TC article.
[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/21/g-google-acquires-privacy-c...
Congrats!
No offense or displeasure to the Frid.ge team of course, if they're happy with it that's fine. I just don't see it as an economically effective investment from Google's end. Perhaps part of it is the extra headlines that are inevitable when a YC company gets acquired? Just doesn't seem like a good value to me.
Surely it's worth the premium to hire a cohesive, motivated team that's already learned the domain and has a proven ability to execute.
Particularly considering the benefit Google can realize from getting a better solution to market faster.
As I stated in my post I understand that demonstrating ability via Frid.ge can certainly be valuable and worth a premium. It just seems to be much higher than one might expect Google to spend on normal hiring processes.
I wonder if the team is going to be moved out to Mountain View or stay in NYC?
Thanks to Fridge, I now know how my grandmother feels like using a computer. The UI was really overwhelming and I could never find what I was after or why things were sorted a certain way.
