While it is true that he said the thought he would be demoing, I don't think the discussion about an acquisitions was a problem in itself:

I said that if Facebook wanted to have a serious conversation about acquiring my team and product, I would entertain the idea.

I think his problem was that Facebook were negotiating from a position of strength (and were honest about that), and he didn't like it.

It really is odd how ecosystem developers always seem to act so shocked when they realize that the prime developer (the one who wrote the API agreement) turns out to hold all the power and control.

b) Even if there is an implicit promise, in this case Facebook acted very ethically in offering to buy him our when they decided to offer the same features. I can't imagine a better way to have handled that situation from Facebook's point of view.

As you note, the trust involved is invariably abused, but always within limits - vaguely defined as they may be. What Dalton Caldwell is observing is that these parameters appear to be shifting.

That's FB's prerogative, and I don't object to their exercising it. But there were two ways to handle the change. The first was to buy Dalton out, shut down the project, but provide jobs for his team. The second was to do what they did with Instagram, preserving the product and the team, and letting things evolve from there.

It seems like going the latter route would actually encourage people who really care about products to build on FB's platform. The former route also provides incentives, but of a much lower grade, and only appealing to people who don't really care about the products they develop, and see the compensated shut-down / aqui-hire as their highest goal.

There is a difference between "using something against you" and a platform keeping their options open.

But, to quote Tim Bray from 2003:

They own the ground you’re building on, and if they decide they don’t like you, or they can do something better with the ground, you’re toast. They can ship their own product and give it away till you go bust, then start charging for it; and use secret APIs you can’t see; and they can break the published APIs you use. All of these things have historically been done by platform vendors.[1]

My point is that no platform has ever behaved differently to how Facebook are now, and Facebook are at least offering money to companies they are planning on competing with.

People will continue to develop for these platforms, though, because they offer the incredible lure of money - they are were the users are, and where the users are the money is too.

[1] http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/12/WebsThePla...

Agreed, but an honest question [and I'm no fan of FB, but...]: how could FB have requested a meeting without acting in bad faith and without being dumb? Seems dumb for FB to say to Dalton: hey, we're about to launch a competitive product and, since you're going to be squashed, we wanted you to come in to talk about an aqui-hire. Now Dalton has inside-ish info on FB (which he will have post meeting anyways) and can run around telling FB's competitors that FB is bidding for his company.

I suppose one of the VPs could have pinged Dalton about meeting for coffee, but then, assuming the informal meeting goes well, Dalton still has to meet all the other VPs, Dirs. Plus FB has a lot of these conversations with companies (I've been in 3 separate ones with 2 companies), so this is kind of the process.

I don't particularly see a better way for FB to handle the situation. Were I Dalton, I would have given myself some cool-down-room and, rather than blowing off the discussion, would have engaged the folks in a discussion and then told everyone that I'd get back to them first thing in the morning. Then I would have gone for a long run and let my thoughts settle. Or at last that's what I did when this happened to me 4 years ago.

I was hoping the outcome of this meeting would be executive-level support for my impending product launch.

What executive-level support would they give him except to buy him/his product? The bad faith here is going into this meeting with no intention of entertaining their obvious position.

If Facebook wanted an acqui-hire from this meeting here, they sold it awfully poorly. They don't have to care, of course, they'll likely just look elsewhere and scoop up 5 people to do the same thing, but from a business perspective this meeting would have seemed to be a waste of time for all concerned. Again, FB has the cash so who cares, but to drag people in with the hope that they'll forget themselves and jump at whatever opportunity is presented. They're taking time and attention away from the thing that attracted them to this person.

Heck, that they kind of throw offers around like this is kind of a lesson for future targets simply to triple their ask. "Sure, $50MM all cash." Screw those jerks.

Let's not insult Dalton. Let's assume Dalton is a smart guy and not a naive guy, but that he's in an unfamiliar situation and that THIS SHIT IS HARD. It's easy to sit on the sidelines and judge. It's quite another thing to figure out what to do when: you're a VP at FB who wants to talk with Dalton about an aqui-hire (seriously, how do you do this?); and when you're Dalton and you receive an email from said VP asking for an audience [what kind of audience?!?! who knows.].

>They could simply have explained their position in a way more >appropriate for the kind of meeting they had portrayed.

My original comment suggested that they couldn't. You haven't provided any evidence to the contrary (in fact, you've suggested my "dumb" route without saying why it's not dumb). Let's assume everyone is a decent person [AFAICT this is a reasonable assumption]: this is not a soap opera; this is trying to figure out how to have a tense conversation with someone you respect.

>Heck, that they kind of throw offers around like this is >kind of a lesson for future targets simply to triple their ask. >"Sure, $50MM all cash." Screw those jerks.

This is a very dangerous comment. Of course, there are anecdotes to the contrary, but, by and large, few think the way you suggest they do and I'd warn fellow readers to take this as an anti-pattern. Those playing the game who get to the aqui-hire level are very high performers, not sell-outs. To suggest that the aqui-hirers are fools from whom to part money or that aqui-hires are sell-outs is to demonstrate extreme naivete. Google's top line really can benefit by adding high performance teams and Google is willing to pay for it. This is rational. At the same time, an acquired CEO, such as Kevin Systrom, can be happy that his biggest, in fact existential, competitor is now his partner. This, too, is rational.

Above all, this stuff is both hard and subjective. Let's look at how to use it to be more effective, rather than how to tabloid-ize it.

I don't have to provide evidence of an opinion, so I don't know where you're pulling that from.

My original comment suggested that they couldn't.

Which was: how could FB have requested a meeting without acting in bad faith and without being dumb?

Really? First of all that appears to be a false dichotomy. Secondly, they have a lot of brains at FB, yet idiocy and bad faith were the only two possible motivators for the meeting? They can figure it out, and if they can't, well, maybe they take the more-informative route.

Dumb, right?

Saying you are at a disadvantage for having everybody on the same page and not being oppositional or predatory is a sign of a bad mind to me. Can't tell him in advance that it's really about acqui-hire? Pretty much the same kind of arbitrary rule as "don't call her for three days." If you want to go through life accomplishing your goals in an antagonistic way, then follow their examples, but engaging in business this way in terms of romantic relationships is "The Rules" type poppycock. I'm not even going to address your assertion and denigration of decency and information as "soap opera."

Oh, but they "couldn't." How powerless FB is in this situation! How ever did they find themselves so?

this is trying to figure out how to have a tense conversation with someone you respect

Isn't that tension entirely related to preserving the hustle? Let's all shed a tear for the difficulties FB has in maintaining a powerful negotiating position.

Thing is, in this case I would say that what you identify as "tension" is a reflection of their powerlessness. Obviously they wanted him on board rather than building it themselves with other people, by sheer dint of coming to him before what other people wind up being their follow-on choices. So the hustle was functional in that they just decided to wield the bat of money that apparently is all they have to offer when manners fail them. Of course Mark Zuckerberg is known to be a rude person, so we can also see this episode as evidence (as you so require) of the fish rotting from the head.

To suggest that the aqui-hirers are fools from whom to part money or that aqui-hires are sell-outs is to demonstrate extreme naivete

Hey, all I'm saying is that if you're open to selling in the first place and FB comes sniffing around, ask for more than you would normally when being ambushed in a meeting. And yes, it's foolish to treat someone you want to work with in the way that they did here. Perhaps their negotiator end-points aren't as highly-performing as you say the acqui-hire targets are.

But I appreciate your point: decency is too much to ask of Facebook.

I thought that I covered this in my comment under the "dumb" option. I don't mean to be disparaging, but I'm not sure how else to take the suggestion, so switching to a not-great analogy:

Your suggestion is sorta like saying that people should walk into a car dealership and say "I want to buy this car. No, not that one. THIS car." It's a classic negotiating fail. If you know they're going to buy the car/company, you're going to milk them.

Of course, FB may think that THIS car/startup is absolutely perfect to acquire, but it's unrealistic to expect them to reveal that bit of info.

It just so happens that what FB were selling was a position of some repute within their organization, which they not only failed to do, but they misrepresented the product in the first place.

I don't understand why this is a big issue. What was the cost to him in going to this meeting? It would hardly have changed the outcome (outcome: he declines their offer and they build a service which clobbers his.)

Your team doesn’t seem to understand that being “good negotiators” vs implying that you will destroy someone’s business built on your “open platform” are not the same thing.

He then goes on to call out the root-cause of the problem as FB's understandable but unfortunate focus on ad-revenue. This puts them at odds with the developers who use the platform and that's clearly not a good dynamic. Both MS and Apple have long understood that getting developers and keeping them happy was essential to keep a platform fertile.

EDIT:fixing typo/poor construction in last sentence.

Microsoft refined the practice to the point they coined a new term for it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

As a recent example from Apple, they are now requiring sandboxing in the App store, which is heavily messing with a number of developers. But they are not sandboxing their own applications.

EDIT: this comment appears to be unpopular? what's the disagreement?

EDIT: Also, I should point out that apple didn't used to mess with developers, probably because they were primarily a hardware company, with low market share, so developers were key, and there was no competition. However, they have expanded and are now also a services company, so they have an incentive to mess with the environment in order to defend their services against competition. Microsoft, conversely, made quite a bit of money off of it's office products, so always had a reason to manipulate the environment.

Time, both in the meeting and in preparing, and in information transfer. He didn't specifically say what he went through, but he may have divulged pieces of the puzzle that they were unaware of.

In retrospect, our contact with the other side that had set up the meeting hadn't properly communicated to us what the meeting would be about, and presumably had not communicated much with his side about what they were looking for at this stage.

Their side was basically dysfunctional, with each person on their team having a different agenda.

I wouldn't say that meeting was mal-intentioned, just that their company was really screwed up.

Facebook may be in a similar stage at certain levels.

a) Facebook will knock on his door again at a later date asking to "acqu-hire".

b) Facebook will eventually release something in-house that will compete with his app (and most likely win due to Facebook's large momentum).

With the impending doom stuff aside, I still don't think that he should've expected getting exec-level support for his product walking in to the meeting. Facebook doesn't _need_ to give him anything. So yeah, he wasted his time, but that's _his_ problem, not Facebook's.

Also, relations does not mean advocate. He has relations with the customer, he is not obliged to advocate their views. Especially not when it goes against FBs interests.

Unfortunately this is a business. Not a university, non-profit or a government entity.

As an example from tech, I believe HN's 'jf' used to be a startup-relations person for Microsoft, whose job really did involve trying to advocate for their needs within Microsoft, reporting out of the product groups' normal management hierarchy to make sure he was giving them third-party input.

I definitely understand your point but I don't think it is correct to use the phrase "not that uncommon" with respect to "for-profit businesses" without defining what types of businesses you are referring to.

The overwhelming majority (anecdotal of course) of for-profit businesses do not have anything like an ombudsmen. I would agree that with respect to newspapers that statement would be correct from what I've seen and probably universities.

I wouldn't want to speculate on the percentages here, but if we believe the numbers as far as the amount of businesses of all sizes that are out there, I think it's safe to say that the majority don't have an ombudsmen. So I would say it is uncommon.

no, thats marketing.

Dev relations works with you once you are already using the platform. Don't get their intentions confused. They may be on your side with bug fixes and feature requests, but if you try to do something that goes against their company, why the hell would they be on your side?

The implication is that by having a large ecosystem with lots of developers, the company will benefit, but in this case, FB appears to have shot themselves in the foot.