My mental model is looking at all of these situations as pre-emptive aquihires.
Meta can make 40 of these hires (over a number of years) and still be in a better place than feeling like they have to make a single $10B acquisition (if they could even make it at that point)
Even if what you say is true, people don't add in this way. They still need to be managed, motivated, and somehow made to work together toward something of value.
Microsoft Research had hundreds of big brains for decades that all worked independently and added little of value to the business.
Most non-tech people do not just use cloud services for their data.
Really not sure where you got that from, but even if it was true, most non-tech people will still shy away from putting a 250G file in a cloud service once they get prompted to upgrade their plan because they don't have enough space.
Right. We don't provide storage. Blip is designed to be the fastest way to send things to your devices and to other people in real time, without waiting for uploads, sync, or managing shared links.
I dunno, seems like most do? Their stuff is in Google Photos, Google Docs, iCloud Drive, etc. And yes they pay for the space once their photos or phone backups get big enough.
And I don't know any non-tech people who have any 250GB files. The only people I know with those shoot 4K video professionally. Or scientists running truly massive simulations.
This isn’t a great look for OpenAI, but acquisitions fall through all the time.
The issue isn’t an acquisition not working out, it’s that the founding/exec team felt it appropriate to arrange their own exits and abandon their team before even communicating that their “successful exit” wasn’t actually happening.
This whole situation feels shockingly close to the Meta/Scale situation, where founders and specific employees were plucked out, and effectively gutted any future prospects for the company.
At least in the Scale case there seemed to be some form of payout to employees and equity holders, but this takes it a whole lot further by just throwing out all other employees.
There is supposed to be the concept that “all common stock is the same”. These fake-acquisitions completely undermine that.
Yep, if investors and early employees keep getting left out in the cold while execs get a soft landing at Big Tech, it's going to shake a lot of trust in the startup game
I don’t think anyone trusts any tech company much these days. It’s been a steep decline in the past 5 years, from arbitrary mandates to the constant talk about firing everyone and hiring an AI. Even as an investor, it’s hard to trust that the “honor system” that once existed is still in play.
Honestly if this acts as a liquidity event for a whole bunch of current employees, while at the same time giving off "Meta hand picked the CEO and whoever they felt were the best AI engineers and jumped ship" energy, I wouldn't be tooo surprised if current "scaliens" view this as the inflection point, and decide it's not worth staying for the other ~51% of their shares.
Wang has, seemingly, spent just as much time and energy over the last couple of years on PR stunts and publicity than on Scale itself. Between testifying to congress about how China is an AI risk (duh) and how AI is important (obviously), putting out press releases about joining boards of large orgs, and getting himself invited to trumps second inauguration. A high-billion-dollar story-headline framed as "Meta paying $14 BILLION for this one guy" is the same.
It very much seems it's been an investment in getting himself to be more of a "household name in AI". That is exactly what Meta needs (or at least thinks it needs) now.
I very much believe that there is very little moat in AI (currently, and in the forseeable future short some underlying hardware/etc breakthrough), and the success (from a consumer perspective) will come down to which of the big-cos (Facebook v Amazon v Google v OpenAI v Anthropic/Claude) consumers trust more. Zuck is, to put it mildly, *not* a trustworthy name for Meta to associate to leading the product that they want consumers to trust and depend on for their entire lives.
Whether or not Wang has any more qualifications than 1) is somewhat of a recognized AI name, and 2) is okay at speaking confidently on topics someone briefed him about, I don't think really plays much into this. If he needs help/assistance/etc with any of the meta scale/politics/management/etc, zuck can buy that for him.
What Zuck can't seem to buy (for himself) is some level of trust.
I dont think the math works out in a way such that individual employees are not interchangable. It's based on engineer labor cost as a whole; there is no difference if the 3yr year employee was Jack or Jane.
The net result here seems to be a tax-induced penalty to any (software) organization < 5 years old, as compared to a (software) organization with 5 years of employee history.
I don’t fully understand your comment but it seems that we agree that the answer to “does that create incentives to try to keep employees longer-term in order to make them more cost-efficient?” is “no”.
How about actors? They produce a thing (content) that is sold for a prolonged period of time. Copyright is what, 20 years?
How would Disney feel if the salary paid to the cast of the Avengers was no longer an expense in that year, but amortized over the entire copyright period of the film.
That’s how it used to be until a special rule was introduced allowing only $15m (or maybe $20m) to be expensed instead of capitalized.
Doesn’t change much for the Avengers films which have production costs around $500m. Disney still has to capitalize 97% of the cost. $15m doesn’t cover a single star’s salary.
Also not a lawyer, but wanted to second what jsbg said.
I've been through this process many times, and I would always say yes and then mention with the recruiter (even if I had to explain that the process was basically "asking politely for permission at the border").
The underlying question that employers really care about is "will you be legally allowed to accept a job offer without unexpected expenses or delays". Even if you file through USCIS (and not petition at the point of entry), you can (should) have an answer in 14 days and ~2k in fees, which is 1) a drop in the bucket for any hiring budget, and 2) not impactful to a hiring timeline.
Employers are subject to substantial penalties if they hire someone who is not legally permitted to work. I think they are woried about more than unexpected delays, though I admit I'm way out of my sphere of knowledge on this subject.
To be clear, I meant "unexpected delays (to work legally)". As in, waiting a year to submit, and hope for, an H1B to be issued, vs waiting 2 weeks for a TN to be approved.
No portion of my initial comment should have been interpreted to mean that employers do not do their own due diligence after actually hiring someone.
Meta can make 40 of these hires (over a number of years) and still be in a better place than feeling like they have to make a single $10B acquisition (if they could even make it at that point)
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