How do you make a comment on an article, if it is not a blog, and you have no direct route to the author ? Simple you blog it and let the internet take care of its self.
Okay I guess that would work if there were a popular blog, but hey you never know :-)
I just read a recent post by Joel Spolsky entitled How Hard Could It Be?: Thanks or No Thanks, where he discusses the difficulty of how to reward innovative ideas, while at the same time not creating issues.
The subject of the article is about Noah Weiss who did an internship with Fog Creek Software, and during that internship came up with the idea to host the Joel jobs page which in a year made Fog Creek >$1mil.
What interests me is that, in the end he decided to offer Noah 10 000 shares in Fog Creek, on the condition that Noah comes back to work for him after his studies. In the end Noah was recruited by Google and so forfeited the shares.
Okay so now you all know the story; Joel here is my question / comment :
Why did you put a condition on it the 10 000 shares ?
As I see it, you were prepared to part with the money so why not just do it anyway. At the end of the day it was the idea leveraging your exposure that generated the money not the work, and the spirit was you wanted to reward him.
However, more importantly, I also see ways in which doing so would have been profitable to you too.
We know that Noah already worked at Fog Creek, so he has an idea what it is like, and I am sure that he enjoyed the experience; being part of something new that ended up being a success. Wouldn’t it have been nice to have rather lost Noah to Google, but have him still have a vested interest in Fog Creek, about 10 000 vested interests in fact; so when the novelty of the nirvana, that Google might just not be, wears off you might be his first option.
Not that you need any more exposure, but it would be a nice article to read about a Google employee choosing to go back to a smaller company ( albeit it a well known one ).
It would also have put a whole new spin on your internship program, where people would now be flocking not just to see if the work place matches the articles, but also knowing they may have an opportunity to profit from their unique ideas – and of course that just means you win more because you become the landing ground of these fresh ideas.
If you could/do do it again, would you put the condition on the shares next time ?
1 comments:
Hey Stephen --
Our shares are restricted stock in a non-public company. By the bylaws of our company they cannot be held by outsiders, which is typical of any small, closely-held private company.
-- Joel
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