Re:Silicon Valley is changing, and its lead over other tech ...
by 0xB31B1B on Friday August 31, 2018 @09:38AM
(#17885458)
You think it’s better that they return money to the fat cat investors then to invest in their own products?
Re:Silicon Valley is changing, and its lead over other tech ...
by repolfx on Friday August 31, 2018 @10:57AM
(#17886086)
The "fat cat investors" are to a large extent these days things like pension funds, or VC firms that will just immediately turn around and re-invest the money into new startups.
And yes, I think that'd be the right thing to do. The sums of money we're talking about here are vast. They're not going to go into the pockets of some stereotyped "fat cat" capitalist. Outside of pension payouts they'll be reallocated to other companies that may be doing important things of the sort that big internet firms just won't tackle, like biotech/drugs research.
Look at it like this. Does Google really need to create yet another instant messaging product for the seventh time? Or would the capital used to do that be better re-allocated to some other part of the economy?
Whilst the no-poach agreements were wrong, I don't think comp was kept artificially low in the way you mean. What drives up comp in the valley at the moment is the existence of companies that make tons of money but have voting, share structures and cultures that don't incentivise them to return any to investors. The combination of huge profits, endless vanity hiring and no dividends or share buybacks is fairly new and it's not clear to me it's a good trend. I don't believe Facebook, Google or Twitter actually need all those engineers they're hiring.