
Ask HN: What is a talent acquisition like? - ryanjmo
Hi Everyone,<p>My co-founder and I are meeting with YouTube in the next few weeks.  For various reasons our best guess is that they are interested in a talent acquisition.<p>We were just wondering if anyone has any personal stories or articles about what it is like to go through a talent acquisition or what possibly to expect.<p>Thanks,
ryanjmo
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kno
Talking about a meeting with YouTube in public may impact your prospect.

My best advice: get a lawyer after initial meeting when you know more about
what they want.

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ryanjmo
Thanks for the advice, but we are not concerned with ruining the prospect.

We are ramen profitable and are going to succeed with our without an
acquisition. We would just be on a different path.

A large reason we put this post out there, is to determine if it is something
we are actually interested in.

Also, being able to be open with the world about what we are doing is one of
my favorite parts about being in a start-up. One of our main goals with our
startup is enjoy the experience. If YouTube really doesn't want to work with
us because we mentioned our meeting publicly, it is an indication that it is
not somewhere we want to work!

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imp
They are owned by a public company though, so they may have some sort of rules
in place for talking about acquisitions before they happen.

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timcederman
From my experience, what occurs during a talent acquisition depends on what
your product is and how you will be integrated to the larger company. No
integration means a good payout, plus a legacy-free transition into the new
company. Then you just have the usual things of culture change, having a boss
again, etc. If you were passionate about your product this may be hard (see
Dodgeball).

If there's any sort of technical part of the acquisition, depending on the
type of technology it can be pretty rough. I was part of a team that was
acquired for talent and technology, and as such we needed to integrate our
search engine from Trovix to Monster.com. It was interesting, but not fun.

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vai
I can imagine the experience, as I'm part of the team integrating Trovix into
Monster, from Monster's end. Definitely interesting, but not fun indeed.

I've often wondered how much in the real world, technology and the associated
costs affect due diligence.

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timcederman
Looking at your comment history it looks like you're part of the Prague team.
Are you working with Earl and Praveen from the MV side, or with Dave and Evan
from Maynard?

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vai
Dave + Evan

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equark
Seems like it depends. The Dodgeball guys clearly hated the transition.

Then there's FriendFeed. Bret Taylor became CTO of Facebook very quickly after
the acquisition and is now the second, and arguably better, public face of
Facebook. His talent level is clearly off the charts though.

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ryan
I've been through it with YouTube, drop me an email if you have specific
questions.

I'd love to be able to share our story with everyone, but we are bound by
confidentiality agreements. I couldn't even tell my friends what was going on
until the day we closed.

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_delirium
Are those confidentiality-for-life kinds of agreements, or just N years until
you can write up the full story (if you wanted to)?

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bdickason
It's 100% about the culture (for lack of a less buzzy term) of the
organization you're going into.

If you'll be working on exciting projects and the people there love what they
do, it will be wonderful. That is how my first 'talent acquisition' went.

If, however, they are working on boring projects and are acquiring you to
'inject some life' into their organization, run away.

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moonpolysoft
I was part of the Powerset acquisition which was largely for tech/talent. The
transition has been a long slow death march to try and reach our bonus
payouts.

