At 20 years, $2m means you can hire 3 people for $33k a year to do the job. At 30 years, you can only hire 2 people for $33k/year. That figure does not include benefits. That may or may not be viable for 19 schools (depending on how far apart they are, etc).
“For [$30 million], you could hire 60 people to work for $50,000/yr for one year.”
$30 million / $50,000 = 600
You wouldn’t be able to hire 600 people, but you’d definitely get more than 60 English majors. Even after taxes, insurance, benefits, HR, management, accounting, rent, equipment, travel expenses, etc, you could probably afford at least 200 English majors at $50,000 a year.
$1.2 million seems so low of a dollar amount, for an multi year effort. Isn't that just like... 1 engineer's salary? $150k/year, 1.5x multiplier to account for benefits and other expenses of hiring somebody.
So thus, the right salary to hire the people they need is somewhere between what they're currently paying, and $1B/year. My guess—and this is only a guess, mind you—is that they'd still be able to staff up on something significantly lower than $1B. But I'm not an economist, so I might be wrong there.
That math doesn't work. If you hire 1% and retain people for three years, you'll be sued once a year ($100 000/year) and spend e.g. 30 x $100 000 = $3 000 000 / year on salaries, before considering hiring costs. It's still expensive, but is it that ridiculous?
The problem is that experienced people cost a lot of money, and since they are typically older with things like a family to support, mortgage to pay, etc, are going to be more risk averse.
Especially in the early stages, all projects are more or less a crapshoot, so in order to tempt someone away from that 200k a year job, you're going to need to hand over a lot of equity, raise a lot of money, or overpower them with sheer force of charisma.
If you want to hire five of these people, you better be heavily bankrolled, or rolling natural 20s.
I doubt the acqui-hire was for $30m. I would believe probably $3m, structured as $1m each over 4 years, with each person getting 100k in the first year, 200k in the 2nd, 300k in the 3rd and 400k in the fourth. Lots of these "acqui-hires" get reported in the press at some stupid number. I know a couple that were reported way off. The original journalist says "it sounds better", and then all the secondary sources just quote the figure from the first.
It's really expensive to hire at that level of seniority - even if the salary is the same once they start, it also takes a lot of time and money to get them to that point.
$2k to find a good hire is nothing. Signing bonuses, referral bonuses, and interview related expenses (air travel, taxis, hotels) are often on that scale or larger. Also, your numbers are way off the mark, you're not going to bring in 15 people for such an interview, you'd be extraordinarily lucky if you even managed to have 15 people that looked good enough to go that far, but even if you did you'd screen it down to a lower number to make it more feasible.
I'd guess that current hires would be getting significantly less than existing hires. To make really life changing money you'd need to get in a couple of years ago.
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