I'm having an incredibly hard time mustering up sympathy or concern for someone who feels they were "scammed" into interviewing for a job that could come with a $2 million signing bonus.
Even if it were the "golden handcuffs" situation someone posited in this thread, where the money would come over three or four years, it's a situation most people would be pleased as Punch to find themselves in.
Naturally, everyone thinks they're Tom Brady, and they're going to be the ones to be the next golden boy getting courted by M&A and feted by TechCrunch and all the rest. But most of us are really just the Danny Aikens of the world, working hard, in the game, happy to be paid for what we love to do.
The author wrote an app. By all accounts, it's a good idea, reasonably well-executed. Not world-changing, not something that's going to build a new industry and launch dozens of careers, or a service that will transform people's lives, or disrupt a market. A nice app.
For that, he's indignant that he might get a multi-million dollar signing bonus and a secure job at one of the largest and most influential corporations on the planet.
If there were ever an example of the arrogance and entitlement outsiders pin on Silicon Valley and the startup / tech community, this would be it. Work because you are passionate about it, because you want to build great things and meet great challenges. Be grateful that you have a good life. Life isn't a lottery.
I think you read a lot of things into this article that aren't there. This isn't about some entitlement to more money. The article is about deceptive recruiting practices at Google. Phone calls and emails filled with lies. Why would Google even need to lie about a potential acquisition (and name drop the founder) when they aren't even looking for one?
The OP just wants the Google person to say, "Hi, I'm from Google HR. Interested in talking about a job?" versus the smoke and mirrors they represented.
The author himself says right in the article that he felt entitled to much more than $2 million.
I explain again that 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. I don’t know what Silicon Valley numbers are like, I say, but surely even there acqui-hire numbers don’t go as high as twice £X million? She replies that it’s usually a maximum of 2 million. I guess that’s dollars.
If he was unhappy with the way Google approached him with their generous rock-star offer, he could simply turn them down and move on. A lengthy blow-by-blow essay seems like pointless complaining about a problem 99% of the world would give their eyeteeth to have.
If he believes he can sell his company for $10M and thus rejects a $2M offer, he is not suffering from entitlement and arrogance. He does not feel entitled to $10M. He does not believe the world owes him $10M. He is simply not selling for a lower price than he thinks he can sell for later.
No, he said that he believed his company had a high likelihood of becoming worth that amount, and that he did not expect their acqui-hire numbers to go that high. Also note the part where they argued with him about whether or not he had actually received a reasonably part of the X million, which indicates to me that they did not expect they'd have to pay all that much at all.
He said that against a backdrop of having done a sale at half the value he listed in the past in the same niche with a much smaller potential market. He might very well be wrong, but he gave a reasoning that is not all that unreasonable. If he didn't believe in the potential value, he presumably wouldn't be working on it.
What he complained about was the deceptive initial implication that he was talking to someone wanting to acquire the product, rather than an acqui-hire. Had the e-mail been from someone identifying themselves as a recruiter, wanting to hire him, and indicating that there would be room for talking acquisition to compensate him for giving up the business, it would have been a very different situation and presumably he'd have said no at the outset.
The section you quoted is where he points out to the recruiter that if it is an acqui-hire, presumably they do not have the budget for the kind of amounts that would make the job worth it for him to give up his company over.
There was no "generous rock-star offer". There was a deceptive approach where $2m was indicated as the maximum that might be offered for an acqui-hire, with no indication of what kind of salary he might get offered. Having dealt with Google recruiters in the past, I know how cagey they can be about salary and total offer value, and frankly in the cases I managed to get a range out of them, they were not worth continuing conversations with. There's no indication of a "generous rock-star offer" in the article.
It may not have been interesting to you, but the audience here includes a lot of people working on startups for whom this kind of situation might be relevant. Maybe not Google. Maybe the cap isn't 2mill. But I've been in similar situations before, and it sucks. It's ok to get angry at deceptive approaches even if you make good money.
(For my part I'm not surprised to see yet another story like this about Google - I have nothing but bad experiences with Google recruiters whenever they've approached me; each time I get less inclined to ever want to consider working there)
Again, it's about deceptive recruiting practices. The author thinks his app is worth more than $2M. Hey, good for him. And most of us are not in that position. But it's not about that. It's about a series of lies to get him to interview for a job. They should just ask him to interview for a job instead of trying to trick him into that by making him feel like Sergey Brin is personally interested in his app.
Sure, sure, but who cares? If you're going to be in business you kind of need to have a thicker skin than this. No one is making him take any offer. No real offer was even extended.
So what if it's deceptive? Either tell them that you don't want to be distracted by interview-prep, or just take the free trip to Google HQ and reject any offer that you don't agree with.
Part of the background here is his previous sale of a business in the same market, that he felt justified certain value assumptions on his end, coupled with being approached in a manner that he at least felt indicated they were looking to acquire the product, rather than primarily looking to hire him.
Even so, the article several times point out that maybe he was naive about how these things works. I read it more as a cautionary "look here how the recruiters worked over naive me" than unwarranted whining.
Even if it were the "golden handcuffs" situation someone posited in this thread, where the money would come over three or four years, it's a situation most people would be pleased as Punch to find themselves in.
Naturally, everyone thinks they're Tom Brady, and they're going to be the ones to be the next golden boy getting courted by M&A and feted by TechCrunch and all the rest. But most of us are really just the Danny Aikens of the world, working hard, in the game, happy to be paid for what we love to do.
The author wrote an app. By all accounts, it's a good idea, reasonably well-executed. Not world-changing, not something that's going to build a new industry and launch dozens of careers, or a service that will transform people's lives, or disrupt a market. A nice app.
For that, he's indignant that he might get a multi-million dollar signing bonus and a secure job at one of the largest and most influential corporations on the planet.
If there were ever an example of the arrogance and entitlement outsiders pin on Silicon Valley and the startup / tech community, this would be it. Work because you are passionate about it, because you want to build great things and meet great challenges. Be grateful that you have a good life. Life isn't a lottery.