As doomsday predictions loom for what AI means for jobs, some AI employees find themselves on a shaky limb. Big tech companies are increasingly paying huge sums to pull away top talent — but avoiding the kind of acquisitions that reward those further down the org chart. The latest acqui-hire comes from Google, which paid $2.4 billion to license technology from startup Windsurf, hire its CEO, and cash out some of its venture backers. The search giant cut a similar deal for Character.AI last year, buying out early investors to hire a key researcher.
Silicon Valley is mad: “This, in the long run, is very bad for startups,” threatening “the social contracts between employees, startups, and investors,” Stratechery’s Ben Thompson writes. “The world needs little tech to win,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC. (The rest of Windsurf is being acqui-hired by another AI coding startup, Cognition.)
Venture capitalists, too, should be nervous. For now, Big Tech is cashing them out to keep the peace; Kleiner Perkins, which backed Windsurf, will reportedly get enough of Google’s cash to triple its investments. But VCs are betting on young AI startups hoping they can replace Google, not be subsumed into it, and are swinging for bigger than 3x returns.