
Are Talent Acquisitions a Sign of a New Bubble? - andrewlchen
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/are-talent-acquisitions-a-sign-of-a-new-bubble/?ref=business&nl=business&emc=dlbka34
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gammarator
I appreciated pg's numbers:

'Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, the high-profile incubator and
investor, answers with some numbers. Of the more than 310 start-ups that have
passed through his startup factory, a mere 25 have been sold and about 18 of
those were talent acquisitions. he said. That leaves more than 285 that are
still toiling away. While some of those are hugely successful — Airbnb and
DropBox, for example — many are not.

“You cannot get yourself acquired on demand,” Mr. Graham said. “You have to do
the start-up like you mean it.”'

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aheilbut
An understanding of this isn't complete without reading the Gawker take on the
original NYT article.

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sbisker
An article which is, I'm pretty sure, here: [http://gawker.com/5803176/how-to-
party-your-way-into-a-multi...](http://gawker.com/5803176/how-to-party-your-
way-into-a-multi+million-dollar-facebook-job)

(Took me some time to find it after you mentioned it, so I figured I'd just
give others the link.)

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dabent
I've worked with recruiters enough to know that they get a bare minimum of
$20k to hook an average engineer up with a mid-level job. The rates go up with
the position and the demand.

With that in mind, I honestly don't see a problem with paying $500k per
engineer if they come with a great product that can improve the buyer's
position. It isn't what I'd think of as a sign of a bubble, but a different
way to spend recruiting money.

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daimyoyo
Companies have been using acquire to hire for a long time and the fact that
there are more companies being acquired doesn't by itself mean there's a
bubble. When startups with no product(color) or no revenue model(flipboard)
are raising money at 9-figure valuations, that's a much better indicator of a
bubble than the fact that a lot of companies are being sold right now.

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Vivtek
Can we just not post articles of the form "[Is/Are] X a sign of a new bubble"
from now on? Let's just all assume that everything up to and including oxygen
metabolism is a possible sign of a new bubble, and get on with our lives,
shall we?

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orenmazor
no, its a sign of the velocirapture.

seriously, everything is a sign of the new bubble now.

