So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self - leaving both investors and the employees left behind high and dry.
If this was a viable strategy then they would have just done it regardless, right?
Meanwhile the solution to that is to break up the monopolies to begin with. You don't have trillion dollar companies monopolizing the labor pool if you don't have trillion dollar companies.
Yes because you don’t like companies being able to pay people more money?
Companies get money from workers (i.e. customers), pay some back to workers (employees), and keep the rest as profit (or waste it on some kind of bureaucratic inefficiency). Workers can get more money by either paying less as customers or getting paid more as employees.
Monopolies screw them on both ends. Customers pay more because there are fewer suppliers, and then employees make less because there is less competition for hiring which also makes it easier for the large employers to coordinate non-poaching agreements.
The fact is though in this scenario Google paid the employees more and in what tech area is Google a “monopoly”?
The fact that Google did “poach” employees means that there wasn’t an agreement not to.
In a market where there are only a small handful of incumbents and then a bunch of precarious cash-strapped startups, the incumbents collude with each other so that they only have to outbid the startups. The startups, meanwhile, are at a disadvantage because e.g. the incumbents control search engine rankings or app distribution channels, which lowers their competitiveness and therefore the amount they can afford pay to employees in competition with the incumbents. The incumbents are then the high bidder even while offering something less than they would have had to in the alternative.
The startups in question weren’t building apps or advertising on Google. The entire reason most startups exist is to get acquired or acquire hired.
Maybe that has something to do with the incumbents (and the laws) making it hard for them to build a sustainable independent new business.
So in what world are startups going to have the funding or the infrastructure to have warehouses worldwide to compete with Amazon or servers to compete with AWS?
Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
> So in what world are startups going to have the funding or the infrastructure to have warehouses worldwide to compete with Amazon or servers to compete with AWS?
In a competitive market you don't have that. Instead of a massive conglomerate having a warehouse in every region, Alice, Bob and Carol each have a warehouse near New York, Dan, Erin and Frank have one near Houston, etc., and then a dozen independent aggregators each negotiate with a warehouse in each region to store goods for anyone who wants to offer fast delivery everywhere.
Meanwhile doing that, whether you're Amazon or not, is inefficient for anything that doesn't need to be delivered on short notice. If you have a recurring subscription to get a box of toiletries every month, it doesn't matter if it arrives on the 17th because they mailed it from a local warehouse on the 16th or a centralized warehouse on the 10th, and delivery companies offer discounts if you palletize shipments based on region even if they come from a central location, which removes the cost of having local warehouses for those regions.
> Or in Google’s case the infrastructure to design custom processors with the demand to actually buy enough slots from TSMC to make it affordable?
If there is aggregate demand for those processors then you sell them to the other people who want them regardless of whether they're within the same corporation, and then they don't have to be.
> You can’t make laws to undue scale efficiencies. A startup isn’t going to make a phone in their garage to compete with Apple no matter what magically thinking they have about the government passing laws.
The defect is in expecting one entity to make the entire phone.
One company makes a screen, one makes a battery, one designs a processor, another fabs it, another makes memory, another makes the OS (or it's open source), another lays out the system board to integrate the various components, another does final assembly, etc.
When you don't require the whole thing to be done under the same umbrella it doesn't take a trillion dollar company to do any given piece.
> Most startups can’t even pay the wages of a mid level employee at BigTech company that has been out of school for three years.
Suppose phone components were easily available as a fungible commodity, and had standardized interfaces so that integrating them was only a modest amount of work, i.e. a year of effort for a full-time engineer. Then you get a phone which sells as an also-ran -- a million units a year for three years, less than 0.5% of Apple's sales volume. The phone sells for $250, less than the cheapest new iPhone, and 0.5% of the retail price goes to pay the engineer.
Then they'd be making $3.75M for that year of work. Those numbers could be off by 10 fold and still be a competitive salary.
Except that the market is too concentrated and the standards don't exist, which means it's not that easy as things are now.
> Just like any other industry, if a startup can’t afford the free market price of labor, that’s a them problem.
The issue is, is it a free market, or a captured one?
If it keeps up, it's only a matter of time before startups stop being able to hire top talent.
Most startup hiring has always been a scam for the idealistic where people would be better off statistically by just working for a publicly traded tech company that put RSUs in your brokerage account that you could immediately sell (and should) diversify once you are vested.
In my latter years of my career, I’ve been offered “great opportunities” at a startup that paid less in cash for more responsibilities than I was making as a mid level employee (cash + RSUs) at BigTech when I was there.
Of course they promised “equity” that was illiquid and probably would have been worthless.
Any evidence of that?
Google and Windsurf
https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...
Amazon
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
Microsoft and Inflection
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-ai-reverse-acqui-hire-150...
Microsoft almost pulled it off with OpenAI during the Altman fiasco.
>Google and Windsurf >https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/01/more-details-emerge-on-how...
that looks strange to me to say the least - a company A's leadership leases completely away the company A's IP to a company B while at the same time getting fat employment offers from the same company B. If it were in Russia i'd say it is a bribe/kickback while in US it looks suspiciously like a huge conflict of interests. How no regulatory agency looked into that...
Huge conflict of interest for who? It was a private company who only had a fiduciary responsibility to its investors and the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor.
There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
>the employees themselves had no responsibilities to refuse a better offer from a competitor
actually they have such a responsibility - if the offer in any way connected (or may be perceived as such) with a deal in which the employee is representing its current employer. The same reason why the President can't take expensive gifts from foreign powers for example ...
>There was a whole stink in 2010 about all of the major tech companies agreeing to not poach other companies’ employees and suppressing wages.
that has no relation to the current discussion.
I am well aware of anti poaching agreements between partners or consulting agencies and clients. I am currently working for a consulting company (full time) and in the past I was an employee at AWS ProServe.
The contract states you can’t solicit employees under that arrangement. But either side’s employees are free to proactively outreach.
I’m not referring to “consulting companies” that are basically doing staff augmentation.
Neither is the case here
It isn't about poaching. It is about how vigorously you'd be protecting the interests of your company A in a deal with company B when simultaneously negotiating your personal offer with the company B, especially if it is [even if just implicitly] packaged together i.e. "the offer happens only if the deal happens." You don't see a conflict of interests here?
There is no evidence that any of these companies had contracts with the acquiring companies before reaching out to the employees.
Listen, I think its bullshit what happened to the Windsurf people. And I'm happy that the Figma people didnt get crammed down with some scam ass preference assplay.
But blaming Lina Khan for the crime orgy that started the minute she was forced out is silly.
Go stick that blade where it belongs. I'll help any way I can.
https://youtu.be/pDaELkYEC_g
I’m sure the employees who Google hired don’t feel at all “crammed”.
The only reason they took this route instead of an acquisition is because of the current regulator environment.
But the current VP was a huge fan of Khan.
Probably talking about character.ai and a few similar cases. It's not the trend GP is making it out to be.
People in government think otherwise
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/13/big-techs-poaching-...
> So now the monopolies are just hiring away all of the people they want from the startup and leaving the company as a shell of its former self
I thought they were dumping everyone at the moment. Unless you’re an AI researcher.
And notice who gets hired…
That means if there are 10 developer - 7 working on the product and 3 working on the fundamental AI problem, those 7 aren’t going to be left (the company didn’t want the product anyway) and the 3 researchers are going to be hired.
Something similar happened with Google and Windsurf. So who benefited from the anti acquisition mood of the previous FTC? Not most of the employees who could have made more just working for a public company in the first place and not even the investors.
Google accomplished the same thing with less red tape and didn’t have to hire the people they didn’t want.
A very self-regulating little arbitrage, because the investors and the monopolies are in the process of merging themselves. This is the part most people seem unwilling to accept: these rich guys are dumb man. When you organize your whole society around rich kids having advantages it only takes a couple of decades before they're all just bad at their jobs.
This mafia capitalism isn't even good for the capitalists! They just can't get it together on a sustainable system!
The under appreciated drag is which is statistically more likely to be talented?
1. Someone from a wealthy / connected family
2. Someone who scrambled to the top of 100,000 other people
Folks can argue good schools, etc. all they want, but proven ability and drive to outcompete others should be a heavy counter argument against nepotism of all sorts.