[ryandrake]

If no employees get anything, why wouldn't they organize and threaten to quit together (leaving Walmart buying the name, a founder or two and some technology with nobody to run it) to try to stop the deal? Isn't the whole idea of accepting 1/2 salary at a start-up because of your glorious equity? Whenever I hear about these "deals" where employees end up with nothing or close to nothing, I wonder what they are thinking. Why accept that?

EDIT: I suppose if the alternative is "run out of money next month and everyone's fired anyway", then worthless equity and a possible job maintaining that code at Walmart doesn't sound so bad.

[csallen]

I've met plenty of startup employees who've spent years educating themselves about programming and <10 minutes reading about equity, stock options, etc.

[adrr]

When Myspace got bought by News Corp, some employees got almost nothing(people who came from intermix) and some got nothing(people who join myspace directly). Lots of employees left afterwards. There's a book about the whole deal called "Stealing Myspace".

[qaq]

There are fairly few F# jobs going around and Jet pays decent $.

[suhail]

It's not likely anyone is accepting 1/2 their market salary. Lots of companies are paying top dollar market only to be slightly less than Google.

[rogerdpack]

Seemed like the founder worked hard to make it a nice place to work. Maybe they just like working there? :)

[ajamesm]

What you just described is basically unionization.