Under civil law this is regarded as tortious interference. Businesses have a contract with their employees and if you interfere with it to harm the employer then you are liable for damages.
If you tried to make a mass offer like this, the employer could likely get a judge to place an injunction against it immediately.
If they don’t notice until further down the line, watch out: damages are unlimited. They can extend to a judge breaking up your new business unit and handing it back to the original employer or rewarding damages of the entire lifetime value of the business unit.
That’s why you never see companies do this :)
Seems like a great way to help out budding monopolies.
While poaching one employee at a time might be usually legal, attempting to poach all employees of a company might not be legal, and either way is considered unethical.
Paying off the investors may be the goal.
Eliminating the product or competition ethically may be the goal.
Buying the competition’s customers, and/or distribution channels may be the goal.
Acquiring the top talent, while giving them the expected reward for having bootstrapped a company, might be the goal. Founders are often uninterested in a salaried position for themselves, but may be interested in a return for the company and payoff for everyone in it - as backpay for their investment, completely separate from their salary going forward.
Also, your hypothesis is not accurate. Buyouts are not always, or even usually, massive. It’s common for them to be small and medium sized. It is definitely not a given that making persuasive individual offers would be any cheaper than an acquisition, let alone “so much” cheaper. Depends entirely on the situation.
The government for another. Hiring all the employees of another company is regulated, and it could be seen as anti-competitive behavior.
You’re thinking of individual poaching, not whole company poaching.
buyouts are often massive considering the alternative, which is the cost of recruiting and possibly inflated salaries for the people you recruit, which frankly happens often in buyouts anyway
Sure some buyouts are big. But plenty are small. Most aren’t “massive”. The histogram, I speculate, is probably something like the Zipf distribution: the frequency of buyouts of a given size is probably inversely proportional to the size, to a first approximation. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
Apple historically tends to look for shipping results, and the underlying software and services (such as using DarkSky's algorithms and server code as starting points) are often worth it over just putting offers out to key people.
This obviously isn't always true; they do have some longer-term research projects and strategic initiatives we've seen leak out (cars and non-invasive blood glucose monitoring are common mentioned ones), but I think Apple generally would prefer to let others succeed or fail in the research.
There's nothing _to_ Pixelmator IMHO other than the product. Apple knows how to do sepia tone filters already.
