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LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

📝 Mastering The Founder Letter. A BTS on the collaboration and competition driving the tech industry. 🤝
🌐 Remote Work Is Eating The World. The pros, cons and pros of building out a global team.
🤯 How Companies Are Owning Emojis. How to transform your brand by claiming your own emoji.

FROM THE INBOX 📨 

Inboxed: Tech Partnership, Tech Poaching

Partnerships between tech companies can be rocky, to say the least. But for companies trying to gain market share, sometimes, it’s inevitable to partner with your competitors. Think of the famous Apple and Google partnership.

Previously arch-rivals in the smartphone market, with Apple's iOS and Google's Android competing for dominance, they've maintained a complex relationship that blends competition with cooperation.

It’s worked well for them so far—particularly for Apple who pockets a cool $20 billion or so to allow Google to be the default browser on the iPhone.

But there is one common theme in which sticks a big, fat wedge in between the most promising of partnerships. The corporate equivalent on hitting on your roommates girlfriend. The poaching of talent. Today we’ll be diving into key partnerships in big tech, and the cases of talent thievery that nearly derailed them.

“One of us must change our policy” - Steve

In 2005, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Apple, sent an email to Bruce Chizen, who was CEO of Adobe at the time. He was upset at Adobe's continued attempts to recruit Apple employees. Jobs was protective of Apple's talent and took a strong stance against what he perceived as poaching.

Jobs' email is a masterclass in communication and negotiation. In just a few short sentences, he shows why he was considered one of the most formidable business leaders of his time.

The email opens with striking directness, immediately addressing the issue of Adobe recruiting Apple employees. Jobs wastes no time with pleasantries, setting a tone of urgency and importance. By stating specific facts; "They have hired one person already and are calling lots more," he shows he's well-informed, leaving no room for denial or ambiguity. Masterclass.

Next he cleverly establishes a moral high ground by mentioning Apple's policy of not recruiting from Adobe. This move says that Adobe's actions are unethical, putting them on the back foot from the start. And the key phrase, "One of us must change our policy," is a brilliant piece of negotiation. It presents an ultimatum without aggression, implying potential consequences if Adobe doesn't comply.

The demand for action, "Please let me know who," requires a concrete response from Chizen. The brevity and firm tone shows he is not messing around, while calling Bruce by first name keeps a personal touch despite the confrontational context. Here is how the rest of the conversation played out.

It took just 63 words in the opening email for Steve to assert dominance, apply pressure, and demand action, ending in the resolution he was after. It's a stunning example of effective business communication.

Google has it’s feeling hurt

The year is 2008, Facebook’s heyday. The best tech talent wanted to work for Zuckerberg—including techies employed by Google. It was the natural progression of a free market, albeit to the chagrin of Jonathan Rosenberg, then one of Google’s SVPs.

We can see from an email exchange between Rosenberg and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg that frustrations were brewing, mainly on Google’s side. “Broader relations seem to be at Defcon 2 at the corporate level,” as far as Rosenberg was concerned. The problem—Google claimed Facebook was ‘poaching’ their employees, breaking a quasi-no-poachy-poachy understanding between the two companies.

Sandberg, to her credit, dispels most of the frustration and de-escalates the situation. And by that I mean it seems like she doesn’t think the ‘issues’ are issues at all. In her words; “We are not specifically trying to hire from google. To the contrary, on the margin, we hire less not more from google as we want our hiring to be broad based. We hire mostly from school directly and we want to continue that. On experienced hires, we want varied experience.”

Regardless, cooler heads prevailed between the two sometimes allies thanks to how Sandberg handled the interaction, with her final statement, “We really do want to work together along all of these lines if we can” putting a nice bow on the interaction.

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“If you hire a single one of these people, this means war” - Steve (again)

In 2005, the talent war between tech giants reached a boiling point. Google, developing its mobile OS—soon to be given the name Android—set its sights on Apple's iPhone team. This crossed a line for Steve Jobs.

Jobs, as mentioned earlier, is known for his intensity, and didn't hesitate to confront the issue directly. He picked up the phone and called Sergey Brin.

Brin would share the news internally that he receiving an "irate call from Steve Jobs" about the recruitment coup. Jobs made it clear: he viewed Google's actions as a betrayal and demanded they stop targeting Apple employees immediately.

“I told we were not building a browser and that to my knowledge we were not systematically going after the Safari team in particular,” the likely petrified Brin would tell his team. “I did not mention we may release an enhanced version [of Mozilla Firefox] but I am not sure we are going to yet,” he said. But Steve was not finished.

Sergey would go on to say, “So a compromise would be to continue with the offer we have made but not to make offers to any of the others unless they get permission from Apple.”

In his biography by Walter Isaacson, Jobs was quoted as saying he was willing to go to "thermonuclear war" with Google over the Android platform, which he saw as a "stolen product."

Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin employed very different tactics in this talent war. Jobs took his usual direct, confrontational approach, using explicit threats and leveraging personal relationships to protect Apple's talent pool.

Brin on the other hand seemed to adopt a more diplomatic strategy. While persistent in Google's hiring efforts, he tried to balance the company's need for top engineers with keeping a workable relationship with Apple, not an easy task given Jobs' intense reactions.

This confrontation led to informal ‘no-poach’ agreements between the biggest of big tech, which later faced legal scrutiny. The incident became a pivotal moment in Silicon Valley, highlighting the high stakes of the talent war and the personal nature of business in tech.

Fun facts

Extra reading

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this BTS moment on some of the biggest companies most competitive and collaborative moments.

_{*Thanks to Caleb Lee who collaborated with me on today’s post.}

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

So apparently people are engineering their products into going viral. Yep—that’s right. I just read Patrick Thompson’s deep dive: Using Viral Loops For Acquisition, and it was pretty neat.

Patrick lays it all out; from what viral loops are to how to effectively measure and implement them. Definitely worth a read if you’re looking to shake things up in your product strategy.

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

COMMUNITY 🍿

Last week we polled you, the community, to see where you sat on the burnout rankings. Not great results really. Sad to see the majority of us are totally burnt out. One reader actually shared that he had just quit his job due to burnout.

Here are some tips that I should listen to myself for combating burnout:

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳