
Ask HN: How did employees do after the Jet.com acquisition? - seattle_spring
As the title said-- I&#x27;m just curious how the rank and file employees and engineers fared with the acquisition.
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wyc
From my understanding, the Jet.com deal was more of an acquihire to get Marc
Lore to work for walmart.com[1]. The Jet.com numbers didn't look good at all,
and they were rapidly burning through capital. Walmart didn't have technology
as a core competency (nothing wrong with that), so it saw an opportunity to
grow into the digital space through this acquisition. This leads me to think
that everyone from the company is likely in golden cuffs.

[1] see the subtle language that suggests Lore will be working on walmart.com:
[http://fortune.com/2016/09/20/walmart-acquisition-
jetcom/](http://fortune.com/2016/09/20/walmart-acquisition-jetcom/)

~~~
sbov
> Walmart didn't have technology as a core competency

Is this really true? Isn't the prototypical example of real world big data
that Walmart learned to stock pop tarts before hurricanes? They also seem to
have a wide range of tech related jobs at their job portal.

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dbcurtis
Walmart clearly knows how to leverage technology. Their business is built
around using technology to lower costs and manage the flow of inventory.
Walmart has always relied very heavily on IT, and has been a driver of retail
IT innovation.

My take is that even a very seasoned technology team with a deep bench can
occasionally miss the beginning of something important, and be forced to catch
up. 1) Don't let that be you. 2) Admit it, someday it _will_ be you, so don't
be so arrogant that you can't start executing plan B.

~~~
qmarchi
Full Disclosure: I work at Wally World

Wal-Mart does use IT to improve the flow of inventory, but also to improve our
interactions with shoppers, employees, and the communities that the stores are
based in.

We recently just had an internal hackathon, of which there was everything from
AI to complete redesigns of our business model. I guarantee that one of those
will become a full project withing the walls.

Insane Ideas. Save Money. Live Better

~~~
burntrelish1273
Curious: WalMart proper or WalMart Labs?

Unsolicited, free-to-steal idea dept.: I think there's a non-zero market (in
some markets) to charge/invite customers to shop outside NBH / even shutdown
24/7 store temporarily for the right $$$$. I, for one, hate shopping with
huge, slow crowds... I'll go somewhere else and/or only go during low-traffic
hours. Btw, Costco (and what was PriceClub) used to do this (eg early hours)
for commercial and executive customers... (oddly, IDKW I haven't downgraded to
Basic given there's almost no advantage to Executive these days.) Apple,
although upmarket extreme, also does this for shopping and training.

Also, wish large chains would trial Amazon Go-style cashierless checkout, but
perhaps adding a paper receipt for legacy interop/loss prevention/audit. All
kinds of great, reusable data could be had with ML/CV with real-time, total
product awareness. Lots-and-lots of cameras, networking and datacenter
floorspace... but likely worth the investment. AI tallying up what was taken
as-it-goes saves a great deal of human effort and customer time, basically an
inevitable modality.

EDIT: Maybe in the future, we won't even need stores when/if drones can bring
things around to try out/handle returns/prevent loss. Can picture drones from
multiple vendors jostling to sell competing product, getting angry with each
other and undercutting pricing of each other in real-time. Perhaps even drones
carrying flowers / selling "Rolex'es" on a train.

~~~
joshka
Sam's club has cashierless payment
[https://www.samsclub.com/sams/pagedetails/content.jsp?pageNa...](https://www.samsclub.com/sams/pagedetails/content.jsp?pageName=scan-
and-go)

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jack_kc
This is a great app. Sam's Club has been my grocery store of choice since I
started using this app.

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markwaldron
I work about 3 blocks down the road from them in Hoboken, and I've seen an
influx of nicer cars in the area. Not sure if there is a correlation between
the two.

~~~
pvitz
Or a causal connection ;)

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LaurenceW1
Just fine...

Disclaimer: I work there.

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justanotheratom
Is the use of F# intact?

~~~
LaurenceW1
yep

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busterarm
You hiring? :D

~~~
qmarchi
Plenty of positions open at Corporate. Might need to move to Bentonville.

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swingbridge
From what I was told employees did well but not anywhere nearly as well as
some of the numbers that had been initially tossed around (e.g. In regards to
the contest winner that got options for signing people up). There were a lot
of people that had to get paid before the employees got their cut.

That said no matter how you slice it, it was an impressive deal considering
the company itself was burning cash like crazy and failing badly on their
original mission of going head to head with Amazon. Well done to the team
there. Only time will tell if saving Jet was ultimately a good move for
WalMart.

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MsABalakrishnan
For what it's worth, I wrote that viral article about the Jet content winner
([http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/08/this-pennsylvania-guy-
probabl...](http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/08/this-pennsylvania-guy-probably-
made-a-killing-on-the-wal-mart-jetcom-deal.html)) and afterward, Jet pretty
seriously clamped down on who would talk to me. I would love to talk to Jet
employees anonymously about how it all went down! It was super interesting.

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djb_hackernews
IIRC, Jet was handing out equity in lots in order to hide the percentage of
equity granted. This typically means a) They want to hide how little piece of
the pie you are getting b) They are going to do further shady stuff like
reverse splits, clawbacks, etc

Edit: The employee in this thread is still working so not FU money. Maybe "FU
for a year while I travel the world" money.

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princetontiger
I know a person who works there, and he has never mentioned it once. I presume
if it was F-U money, there would be some conspicuous consumption. He joined a
year before the acquisition.

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up_and_up
A year before an exit prob means they only vested like 25% percent of their
options. At that stage they were prob pretty expensive options and highly
diluted. Options are not much good if they are not vested and priced too high.

~~~
harryh
Typically when a company is acquired unvested employee options are converted
into options in the acquiring company's stock. So in this example the employee
in question would just have to work another three years to realize the gains
(just as he would have had to do otherwise).

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sk5t
Although not apropos to the question posed, I'd like to share that my recent,
first (and final) attempt to buy something from jet.com went about as poorly
as it could have, given that I ordered a readily-available monitor, and it
took Jet a full week to arrive at the conclusion that they could not actually
procure/sell it to me. Rather pathetic.

