The answer is simple: we love destruction. We don’t like order — unless we briefly own a monopoly, take it public or sell it to Cisco and recycle the money.
There was much to love in that Microsoft’s projected acquisition of Yahoo! The people, the cultures were incompatible, there were duplicate products, mail as an example, different advertising platforms and disparate server “farms”. Lovely.
Thanks to Microsoft’s unsolicited offer, techies were going to stream out of Yahoo! We were going to get a fresh supply of much-needed engineers for our start-ups.
You see, we love Google but they’ve been a pain in the wallet lately. How do you compete with three free meals a day, Google’s own buses transporting them to work and back, 20% time for their pet projects, on-site laundry and dry-cleaning pick-up and delivery, free munchies, soda, organic coffee and green tea everywhere on campus? The monstrous heap of amenities – I was going to forget massages and restricted stock, not riskier options – makes getting talent for our nascent companies much harder. Harder as in expensive. Expensive as in threat to our return on investment.
So, for a moment, we thought of Steve Ballmer as our benefactor. The Yahoo! acquisition closes, the engineer cashes her or his stock options after the prescribed interval and leaves.
This is a triple win.
First, the engineer pays off student loans or part of a mortgage. This results in a mind more open to risk, to joining an unproven company.
Second, the time the individual must “mark” before cashing out of the combined company is used to our benefit. Writing code for a new music widget site, a PowerPoint presentation to raise money, just thinking what to do next or schmoozing with a team in formation. This is all good traditional Silicon Valley use of OPM, Other People’s Money.
Third and last, building up a head of steam. Frustration begets creativity. Large company (let alone victim of an acquisition) politics creates negative energy. We invert it, we channel it towards building a shining (as in gold) proof of what the old fogies should have done if only they had listened.
Some say we shouldn’t despair. Wait one quarter or two, Yahoo’s performance will tank, so will the stock. In six months, Microsoft might get the company for ten billions less. And we still get a fresh supply of adequately frustrated engineers.
In the meantime, we’re watching a migration of execs from Google to Facebook. A COO, Sheryl Sandberg, a CFO, Gideon Yu, a PR exec, Elliot Schrage, to name but the most prominent. We’re not really interested in such individuals as their most prominent skills are corporate politics and PowerPoint. An exodus of engineers would be another topic, they know things we can’t see but care for. These execs, on the other hand, jump from a company with an immensely profitable business to one with a huge (70 million) user base but no earnings. Facebook is now raising money ($100 million) through debt because no investor wants to pony up more funds at the latest $15 billion valuation. Unlike Google, Facebook is still a private company, we can’t see the stock deals the transfuges are getting as a reward for their skill, experience, reputation and risk taking. Who knows, they might soon work for Microsoft. The company invested $240 million in Facebook in October 2007, getting 1.6% of the company, but it apparently declined to do more – for the time being. I guess we’ll have to wait a little more to see if Steve Ballmer gets us freshly motivated engineers out of Facebook. –JLG
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