Founder here of a company that attempted to do an acquihire Hail Mary.
Going to be frank with you. 1.5 months is not enough time. Go through the motions and meet with FAANG, but for all intents and purposes it is too late. There’s very little incentive for BigCo to buy a dead company.
Tell the team now, pay out their salaries for next 1.5 months but have them focus full time on getting new jobs. That’s the best you can do for them.
Appreciate the frank perspective. Understand that time is not our friend here.
I guess I'm just wondering / hoping if it is possible that the BigCo just hires our team? I understand that there isn't going to be a big (if any) pay out for us as the founders here. We've proven that we can ship product and work well together.
The interview process shouldn't take too long if they want to do it, right? Or am I being naive / grasping at straws here..
Is 1.5 months enough to even keep them another day without going insolvent? For example you may need to pay notice and other termination related costs. Or is the
runway taking that into account.
Ah, yes -- to expand on this. You know how some countries employee a large number of people to engage on social media platforms. They have to put in enough good content to build up their rank, and then use that high ranking to subtly put out propaganda which would get more visibility due to their user status. But that takes a lot of effort and manpower.
Now take an LLM that you can feed it questions or discussions from sites, have it jump in with what appears to be meaningful content, gets a bunch of "karma", then gradually start putting out the propaganda. It would be a hard item to fight.
I love that whenever one of these threads shows up, someone always appears to suggest that banality and evil are entirely separate from one another, despite the entire history of the 20th century.
I've also read, they're using AI to declassify materials. Humans still make the high level decisions, language models tackle the boring work of reacting text and whatnot.
Luckily, that same LLM can summarize that really really boring report... and, if you ask it to, it'll make it exciting, as well. Maybe too exciting...?!
I'm not counting cumulative hours of productive work, I'm counting duration from inception to working implementation.
I consider one person knocking something out in one day that would previously have taken them 10 days of wrestling with to be a 10x increase in productivity.
And I'd consider one person building a proof of concept in a couple hours that would have taken 5 people 10 weeks of back and forth meetings, planning, pushback and reluctance to be a 1000x improvement in productivity.
These tools are seriously reducing the bar for knocking stuff out that would have previously required much more significant time investment and risk to even consider let alone tackle.
I've personally used copilot and chatgpt to implement things that would have taken me months of study and wrestling with in just a few hours.
Going to be frank with you. 1.5 months is not enough time. Go through the motions and meet with FAANG, but for all intents and purposes it is too late. There’s very little incentive for BigCo to buy a dead company.
Tell the team now, pay out their salaries for next 1.5 months but have them focus full time on getting new jobs. That’s the best you can do for them.