Re:Google claims Levandowski launched competing projects lon...
by austenallred on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @09:58AM
(#14032619)
These things are related. You don't get a price war over someone that results in paying them $100m if you don't believe that person will create over $100m in value.
And since this person went off, started their own company, and sold it a couple years later for $1 Billion, it seems whoever was offering that paycheck was right to do so.
Re:Google claims Levandowski launched competing projects lon...
by lovich on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @10:35AM
(#14033033)
That's the thought process behind investing, but just because the investment risk was taken doesn't mean they actually created that value. Also with strategic investments sometimes it isn't that your investment generates that much revenue for you, but ithe does deny your competition access to that resource
Re:Google claims Levandowski launched competing projects lon...
by joshuamorton on Tuesday April 04, 2017 @11:27AM
(#14033644)
Well, keep in mind that we also don't know the timescale this was over. If it was $120mm in a year, then that's perhaps crazy, but 120 million over 5 or ten years?
With 80 billion in revenue and ~75K employees according to a google search, that means that there's an expectation that an average hire will drive $1 million in revenue per year. To be paid 120M/year you'd need to drive significantly more than that, but to be paid 20M/year, that's now someone who is 50x the average employee, not 200x the average employee, and that's reasonable. I think we all know an engineer or two who is extraordinary.
I'm still having a hard time believing that a single person created 100 million in value for Google for a product that isn't currently being sold. It seems more like a result of a price war for self driving car talent as companies are scrambling to try and take the whole self driving car market before anyone else