Last week Google offered one guy $3.5m not to leave for Facebook. This week the record just went up to $6m. So there's a talent bubble in the Valley? Right. But only Gooogle engineers get to play this time? Nope.
Facebook's last few technical moves - the Like button, Messenger - were all about capturing more of the online display market. Display advertising is where Facebook makes its money (about $1.1bn this year), so it's hardly rocket science that it's going to put its engineers on projects that sew that market up. So the next people who'll be getting calls from Mark Z's guys - and therefore crazy options offers - are going to be the sales guys.
Display sales is a pretty small world and it turns on a handful of relationships between the media buyers and strategists at the biggest agencies and the salespeople at the publisher end. If you wanted to disrupt the incumbents you'd make the technical moves Facebook already has and then you'd poach the people with the big rolodexes at Yahoo, MSN, AOL and, increasingly these days, Google. Hence, bubble time for sales as well as engineers. We'll see at least one of these bidding wars break out over a salesperson at one of the portals before Xmas.
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