Google Paid This Man $100 Million

http://www.sfgate.com/technology/businessinsider/article/Google-Paid-This-Man-100-Million-Here-s-His-4414507.php

by jmount • 13 years ago

231 108 13 years ago

yekko• 13 years ago

It's only a matter of time before us little developers get's similar packages!

cygwin982• 13 years ago

Not really. I have been curious on what kind of compensation Paul Buchheit obtained for his creation of gmail and adsense, the former being the one of the two GOOG services I depend on daily, the latter built the empire financially. I am pretty sure that that amount could be far lower than $100M, which is a very depressive fact for our programmers.

mratzloff• 13 years ago

Sales guys and top product guys are more visible, and therefore have higher incomes and bigger bonuses. It's just how it works.

capred• 13 years ago

Does anyone know if these types of $100M numbers are actually true? I think it makes a great headline but wouldn't everyone at senior ranks get packages like this making it unsustainable?

niggler• 13 years ago

Google is a 258B market cap company (as per yesterday's closing price). They can afford to give hundreds of these packages, even if they diluted the stock, without moving the needle too much.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

It's only paper, and Google is under the spotlight for anti-poaching collusion. This story makes them look like in-demand workers benefit from their policies rather than the worker just laboring away unaware that other companies have already agreed with Google not to try to hire him away.

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

It does seem likely that some tricks were involved to arrive at a sensational number.

But if Google pays an average engineer on the order of $100,000 , this is 1000 times the average annual salary as a one time bonus.

That seems exceptional, certainly, but not completely insane.

On the flip side, it might keep a certain type of engineer for bolting for a startup. Even the most optimistic entrepreneur knows the odds of a $100 M payday are pretty much non-existent.

robrenaud• 13 years ago

Google pays a starting engineer fresh out of college that much salary, and then there is stock and bonus incentive compensation.

Evbn4• 13 years ago

How many people do you think are VP's at Google? A few hundred at most? $X million per year is normal for a big co VP. This isn't like a bank were every teller or saleman is called VP.

He is a One-percenter at the top of the Google pyramid.

NelsonMinar• 13 years ago

Original source for the article, with better formatting: http://www.businessinsider.com/neal-mohan-googles-100-millio...

majani• 13 years ago

A study showed that links from Business Insider stand an extremely low chance of getting upvotes on HN ( http://blog.rjmetrics.com/surprising-hacker-news-data-analys... ). That's why people post other websites' syndications of BI.

nikcub2• 13 years ago

which is a shame, because BI has been really good recently - to the point that I visit the site each day

that said, I do enjoy the irony of a BI original article being syndicated by another publisher and becoming more popular than the original source

iamvictorious• 13 years ago

It makes sense ... the guy is running a multi-billion dollar new business line for Google that is their most meaningful business outside of search ads.

genericresponse• 13 years ago

The article makes a point to say that he started with a job that paid a "humble" $60,000 per year in 1997. Based on my quick and dirty run on wolfram alpha, that is the equivalent to $120,000 per year today. Not so much of a humble beginning for a second job out of college.

waterlesscloud3• 13 years ago

What? That can't possibly be right.

BLS says it's more like $86k

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=60000&year1...

jarcoal• 13 years ago

Was just about to post that exact link. Still not too shabby.

spullara• 13 years ago

That is the same salary I was being paid as my second job out of college at WebLogic in San Francisco in Dec 1996. It was a step down from the consulting company I had come from in Chicago but so much better!

cridal2• 13 years ago

Wow. Definitely, an interesting reading. And a special guy, no question about it. On the other hand, the guy didn't cure cancer. Doesn't it give anyone pause to thin that the topic of conversation is 'ads'? You know, those little annoying things you would never click, and which get in the way of your normal life.

I mean we're talking about billions of dollars. So much human talent, skill, intelligence taken away from really important things... Just sad...

quaunaut• 13 years ago

I'm not about to say that this is as noble as curing cancer- but then again, the skills aren't one to one. Generally the kinds of people who are able to think at such a high level strategically for a business, have very different ways of thinking from those who do hard science. Science is slow, arduous, and full of rigor in a way that would probably make Neal into a mediocre scientist at best. Things that Neal accomplishes at Google in a week, he wouldn't see movement on as a scientist in his lifetime. They require different sorts of people.

Not to mention- while he is getting paid a monstrous sum of money, think of how many people he is also enabling to have jobs, both at Google and the businesses that use their services. The direct effect is obviously very different, but I'd bet he does a lot of good for the world in his own way.

codeonfire• 13 years ago

Equally plausible to the 'providing value' theory are several possible scenarios of externalities that can't be mentioned without asbestos underwear. And as for thinking about how many jobs a person is enabling, we'll just call that the 'dear leader' argument.

slyv• 13 years ago

Ads are also the thing that enables really amazing things to exist. Regardless of your feelings about facebook, the community it has created has had drastic impacts on the world at large. Almost the entire knowledge of humanity is now in anyone's grasp with a simple click of a button (Google). That was only possible because Google was able to make money off of it through ads. How do you propose that the internet pay for its self without ads? The whole freedom of the internet is because they can make money off of ads.

Not everyone needs to cure cancer to do something great.

cridal2• 13 years ago

'cure cancer' was just a placeholder for anything of greater importance to the human condition. However, maybe you are onto something. Maybe ads are indeed the lifeblood of the new interconnected, networked world of century 21 and beyond. I guess nobody figured out a better way to sustain life on the 'internets'. Yet...

rayiner3• 13 years ago

What's deeply ironic is the modern internet is bankrolled by brand trademark monopolies, but programmed by a bunch of people who complain about government-granted monopolies...

There's a quote from the 1950's from a judge very skeptical of extending trademark law to the effect of "we shouldn't allow building brands too much, because then people will buy things for reasons other than product quality and that'll undermine competition in the marketplace by making products non-fungible."

I personally like monopolies,[1] so it's cool with me, but you have to wonder what the internet would look like if Adidas sold shoes and not "footwear experiences."

[1] There is no profit in perfectly competitive industries, and thus no money to do cool stuff. That's why, e.g., Microsoft is so screwed. It keeps hoping for innovation out of companies like Acer, Lenovo, Asus, etc, that have profit margins of just a few %.

DanBC• 13 years ago

Find a way to cure cancer while serving ads and you'll be both rich and famous.

EDIT: This sounds snarkier than I meant it to, sorry. I agree that there are many things that I look at and I think "This is nuts!" - like how cheap products are that get mass produced in China. Someone gets oil from a deep sea well; refines it, turns it into plastic, ships it to a factory, who do stuff with it, put it in a box, put all those into other boxes, ship it, distribute it locally, someone takes all the little boxes out of the big boxes and puts them on display, and I can buy this for a couple of dollars.

Yes, it's weird that we spend millions on Barbie dolls, and not so much on cancer or malaria or HIV or hunger.

Zakharov• 13 years ago

It's reasonably likely that a good chunk of the $100m will end up going to charity, which would go a lot further toward curing cancer or whatever the charity is focused on.

patrickk2• 13 years ago

Or perhaps angel investing- funding the next wave of innovation.

vacri2• 13 years ago

This guy facilitated the ads that support google's wide range of quality services given free to anyone anywhere in the world. Google maps alone has had a positive humanitarian impact to a great many people. It's not the stereotypical marketing exec in an advertising company that only makes adverts.

simonsarris• 13 years ago

I find this fascinating. It almost smacks of game theory. A land-mined game of incentives, anyway.

Think of the sheer amount of considerations that go into a decision like this. Higher-ups at Google must acknowledge:

* Offering someone an enormous sum only after someone else has made you an offer can be off-putting. Consider the many articles written about never making counter offers[1], or never accepting them.

* Along the same lines, if you're not offered a large enough sum to stay, you might take it as an insult. "They're only offering me this much money after I've considered leaving?" Google certainly made sure the sum was large enough, by any count.

* Offering an enormous sum to one person may tempt others to fish out offers from other companies. Others may feel like they're never going to get a raise unless they are courting or being courted actively.

* Google's decision-makers (or check-writers) have to be careful about the number picked. They want to send a message to the person, and to other companies, and to the market. But they probably don't want to end up paying $100m for every high value employee. Luckily for Google, if its gonna be a cash arms-race against other companies, there are few that can do serious battle with them.

* Speaking of high value employees, while you might get person A to stay, you make make resentful group B. After all, there's already a comment here: "It's only a matter of time before us little developers get's similar packages!" It's not a stretch for anyone to sympathize with that view.

~~~

And then, at the end of all that, people in a room pursed their lips together and quietly nodded while somebody pulled out the (metaphorical) checkbook. This guy is staying, it's going to be this much money, and we're going to make it purposefully public knowledge. Signals everywhere.

It seems to be a dangerous game. Others may (as a default) suddenly feel unappreciated since Google hasn't made them an offer to keep being a Googler, and perhaps hasn't approached them with any considerable raise in some time. 100 million ensures that you keep a single employee, but how many do you alienate at the same time?

Hard to blame Google's decision, I'm sure they gave it much more thought than I have. I wish I could know what they're thinking, it's just so fascinating what goes into this.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3549384

rhizome6• 13 years ago

Based on a virtual napkin math based on what's in the story and GOOG's current stock price, I'm speculating the entire deal was simply "200,000 options." I'm sure he got a promotion/raise out of it as well.

RockyMcNuts3• 13 years ago

vesting over... 7-10 years?

$10m a year for a guy running a $7b business.

Evbn4• 13 years ago

Kind of a long way of describing that big company big wigs get paid a lot of money, and it isn't really a big issue because no worker bee is as irreplaceable.

He knows a lot of similarly well placed people and knows a lot of Google's business which competitors would be interested to learn about (nothing informal on paper of course), and like a tin pot dictatorship, stability is better than churn, regardless of whether the stable leaders are amazingly good or not.

dopamean3• 13 years ago

> big company big wigs

I think Mohan is a little more than just another "big wig." Google probably should have given him an incentives package similar to $100 million a long time ago.

nikcub2• 13 years ago

Google is safe offering him $100M without offending the other employees, because the other employees at that level at Google already earn that much, if not more.

Giving him $100M was more of a correction because he arrived at the company later than the other equiv execs. Most of the top tiers of employees at Google, which is where he would be, are worth hundreds or millions and more through vested stock, new options, bonuses, etc.

bjourne2• 13 years ago

I find that very hard to believe. I'm ok with the talk about hackers being 10x more productive than regular developers. But a $100m bonus would mean that guy is about 1000 times more valuable than the average. It defies common sense in every way. And it's not just because I'm jealous and resentful I'm thinking that, no ones time is that valuable.

avenger1232• 13 years ago

This is a classic story of really good negotiation.

Getting the very serious offer from Twitter was the best thing to happen to Neal.

I can only imagine the negotiation with Google that he must of had. It probably went on the lines of something like this -

"Hey, I really love it here at Google. I am really excited with what we are working on and want to deliver it but this Twitter offer is just something that I can't ignore. I am looking at the financial future of my family and I would be doing them a disservice if I don't consider this offer seriously. Is there anything we can do to just make this offer go away."

Neal had the upper hand. Worst-case scenario for him would be that there would be no change. He would continue to work at Google. Next best case scenario would be that he would be working at another mega-tech company, and getting better compensated with potentially even greater upside.

Google was in a position of weakness in either case. If they did nothing and he left, it would amount to even more collateral damage as others would get the message that Google can't compete and Twitter would make even more offers to others.

By paying him out, they basically paid him the opportunity cost in real dollars that he may have had if he moved to Twitter.

In all of this, Neal's professionalism would have tipped the favor on his side.

Evbn4• 13 years ago

Some people might be happier if more of the hundred millionaires walked out to pillage flailing competitors. It isn't obvious that VP retention is good for morale.

But it would be cool if Larry Page said "your old org, from intern to director, says you are the the grease in our money machine, we will always pay you more than any one else would offer, and we want you to find out how high we can reward you"

7774662• 13 years ago

Serious question: does the sweetened language, how you couch the situation really make a difference to decision makers?

vacri2• 13 years ago

I think when you start talking about the financial future of your family, it makes more sense when you're a line employee. But when you're on a salary well into the six figures, it sounds disinegenuous (to me) to say "we're struggling here". By all means go for "hey, I'm in demand and thinking of moving - business is business", but "I'm moving because I'm concerned about my personal finances"?

But then again, I'm not the guy who does salary negotiations...

wallflower• 13 years ago

This is a job for life and then some.

If you compare this with full professorship (academic tenure), that will cost the university about $4 million (assuming $60k/yr - probably $6-7 million if the university is upper echelon). So conservatively this is 10-15x what tenure is.

Neal Mohan sounds like the business equivalent of Jeff Dean [1]

[1] http://research.google.com/people/jeff/

hyperbovine• 13 years ago

Ahem. This is 10-15x the money portion of tenure. You still have to think about advertising all day every day. I'd take the tenure.

samstave• 13 years ago

I am completely naive to what you just said, may you please explain like I am five? [I am dead serious]

snaky• 13 years ago

>have to think about advertising all day every day

That sounds no difference from 'think about chemistry all day every day', doesn't it?

I think advertising is more interesting and inspiring these days than many of traditional science areas. Not to mention it's a huge field including bleeding age AI, Big Data, performance, etc.

SeoxyS• 13 years ago

Google's purchase of DoubleClick seems to be considered a huge success. I'm curious how the $750M purchase of AdMob is seen in the company. Does anybody have an insight or references?

Evbn4• 13 years ago

Does anyone remember when DoubleClick was the most hated company on the Internet? Spying on users, displaying obnoxious ads? The Evil that Google was to Not Be?

flyinglizard3• 13 years ago

Reading this, his compensation is the least amazing part. If this article is true, it should have been titled "A Story Of Competence". Does anyone have any doubt the guy is generating Google this money many times over? It's simple math. It has nothing to do with curing cancer, economical equality or anything else. He's something that's worth X and pays back many X.

I can understand why this comes as a shock to some; it may be difficult to accept that another person doing his 9-5 job can bring so much value to a company. I always suspected such value creators exist (Jobs would be one).

So good for him for delivering, and good for Google for acknowledging and compensating accordingly. And good for me too; I'm taking my first steps as an advertiser with Google and I'm really liking what I'm finding so far.

dopamean3• 13 years ago

People sometimes find it difficult to understand that some people are actually worth the astronomical figures they are paid. When we hear about the big pay day it's easy to focus on that number what not what was done to earn it.

flyinglizard3• 13 years ago

True, and it's way easier to accept how someone is a successful businessman or a stakeholder in a company, than it is to accept that someone may be actually producing this kind of value on a personal level. It's easy to imagine how some trader did some wheeling and dealing for a quick buck or how someone with shrewd instincts made a profitable investment, but it's very difficult to imagine how someone creates all this value by himself, day in day out; how someone stands out like this in an organization like Google, which is both an intellectual powerhouse and far removed from the compensation culture in the finance sector - this is even more difficult to accept.

Maybe that's why people pick on CEO salaries but stay silent on the shareholder profits from the very same corporations. You can imagine 100 million dollars of oil barrels or real estate, but you can't imagine a 100 million dollars mind.

richcollins• 13 years ago

The important consideration are the alternatives. He may easily create that much value but are there other people (substitutes) that could create as much or nearly as much for far less than 100M?

flyinglizard3• 13 years ago

Being that there aren't many people with this ability, and that there are absolutely no indicators as to their performance apart from letting them do the job over a prolonged period (as many companies hiring hotshots discovered), and that the position is directly responsible for billions in revenue - I'd say that it's not realistic to expect a drop in replacement.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

I think the compensation is the most amazing part. There are so many competent people out there generating many multiples of value for their employers that it's surprising he's not getting screwed like the rest. That is, that Google recognizes and compensates him for his competence is the "man bites dog" aspect of this story.

dyno123454• 13 years ago

Is there reason to believe that successful executives are not like successful traders, in that they behave better than chance?

That is, if you make 10,000 people executives and make them make decisions by flipping coins, won't 100 of them be in the top 1% even if success is the result of successive chance outcomes?

LordHumungous• 13 years ago

I highly doubt he's bringing in $100M for Google. I think he knows $100M worth of Google's secrets.

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

I find it sort of odd that people, especially on HN, would resist the idea. Many founders have earned for themselves tens or hundreds of millions of dollars through their startups (either through revenue or acquisition). And we accept C-level execs to earn this kind of money without really questioning whether they are actually worth it.

theverse2• 13 years ago

I work for Google and don't think anyone alone can bring this amount of value alone, knowing well that every decision is taken very collectively. There are some many in this article that doesn't fit Google's work culture.

OGinparadise3• 13 years ago

knowing well that every decision is taken very collectively. There are some many in this article that doesn't fit Google's work culture.

So you have a company wide vote on major decisions? That's very interesting. How did you vote on buying Motorola or replacing Yelp and other local results with Google Local? What about Google+ being added to everything?

dyno123454• 13 years ago

Note to self: Become an executive.

wilfra2• 13 years ago

*Become indispensable in a role where you are directly responsible for driving billions of dollars in revenue.

swah• 13 years ago

I think Seth Godin's book Linchpin talks about this - but I've only skimmed it.

dyno123454• 13 years ago

Step 1: Become an executive

dkwak• 13 years ago

I've always been curious what display advertising is and how it generates so much revenue for Google. Are there any good resources to learn more about what exactly goes on behind the scenes? Do those little ads on my gmail sidebar really create billions in wealth? Or is there some super secret illuminati-esque subliminal advertising going on?

InclinedPlane3• 13 years ago

http://www.google.com/ads/displaynetwork/

It's distinguished from search-based advertising (e.g. adwords). It's basically just ordinary online advertising, and there are a great many different ad networks out there already. However, google's network has been gaining a huge amount of traction recently and took the top spot in marketshare within the last year or so, even pulling ahead of Facebook. In total these sorts of ads are worth around $2 billion a year in revenue for google but both the size of the market and google's share of it are growing at double digit rates so google's revenue from it is likely to double within the next few years.

rckrd• 13 years ago

The article mentions an "epic 400-500 page Powerpoint document" outlining Mohan's strategies.

In the rare chance that this is floating around the internet, does anyone know where it would be or more information on it?

patrickk2• 13 years ago

Sounds like the kind of document that the distribution of would be tightly controlled. It was probably shown to select people, but not actually emailed to anyone. You get to see the slides, but you don't get a copy.

whnevan• 13 years ago

"They'd spent the months prior trying to turn Twitter into "a real company" after years of neglectful management."

Anyone care to explain how the management was neglectful? Serious question.

Maven911• 13 years ago

I think it might have to do with the founder, jack dorsey, staying on as CEO, though he was eventually ousted out of that role

namank• 13 years ago

Wonder how it worked out...

Did he hand in his resignation and was asked to reconsider? Did he tell them he wanted more money? Did they find out about the twitter offer from outside sources and arrange for the bump?

How did the semantics play out?!

SKy33• 13 years ago

This happened at a time when Google was bleeding top management talent to Facebook and Twitter. http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/06/google-said-to-have-high-le...

Sundar Pichai was also offered $50M. As things have settled down, I doubt if this would happen again, at least anytime soon.

Tycho• 13 years ago

I'm thinking either this story is entirely sensationalized, or Google are scared that this guy will take his roadmap and go execute it elsewhere. Like he has seen upcoming trends and Google know they have to be first to act on them. I wonder what they could be...

erhanerdogan• 13 years ago

According to story, he did use Powerpoint. It is bothering me.

michaelochurch• 13 years ago

You know what? Fuck that.

Nothing against this guy. If it were $1 million, or $3 million, I probably wouldn't bat an eye.

A hundred million for a non-technical executive would be OK, if engineers had basic autonomy and open allocation. Then (and only then) they'd actually be able to afford (morally speaking) a $100M payout to a non-technical executive.

Don't call yourself a technical company if engineers in the $100k-200k range can't even fucking change projects until 18 months in (and often not even then, due to a corrupt performance review system) but you're running a private welfare system for non-tech executives.

I know all about Hanlon's Razor ("never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence") but somewhere around the 5-standard-deviation incompetence level I go back to malice because 5-sigma is just awful rare. Paying a non-tech executive $100M while engineers making < 1% of that struggle to get a decent project is 8, 9 sigma at the least.

Choke on a fucking taint, Google. Choke. On. A. Taint.

(Or just implement basic autonomy/open allocation for all engineers. Then we're cool no matter what you pay your execs.)

cygwin982• 13 years ago

What kind of trade secrets this guy could possess that made GOOG feel so threatened to make this offer, since nobody is indispensable, right? Care to shed some lights on this?

I know GOOG has been dominating the search market for more than a decade, does it also have the same position in the ad market?

_k• 13 years ago

Regarding epen allocation. What if only 2 engineers are needed and 100 are interested ?

rhizome6• 13 years ago

To use an anecdote from just this morning, if you Google the terms, "google tasks android," you'll see that the inverse may also be true: Google engineers able and interested to work on something that is a no-op for mysterious reasons.

yuhong• 13 years ago

BTW, on Google, what do you think of Eric Schmidt? Someone suggested after the anti-poaching fiasco that he should be fired: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3523513

vannevar• 13 years ago

They say Mohan is the visionary who predicted how brand advertising would fund the Internet, turned this vision into a plan, and then executed it.

Some say 'fund', others might say 'destroy'. What's in a word?

Google Paid This Man $100 Million

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