I disagree. I think it's MUCH worse when, for example, you read an article about a Kickstarter project on Mashable or TechCrunch only to find that clicking on the hyperlink leads to other articles on those sites about Kickstarter and not the actual project link. I think those sites have gotten better at linking directly when commenters complain.

I think the idea is to pass your SEO juice to your other pages rather than external pages.

I think it's only 32 if you're relatively unknown or unproven. If you're Biz Stone, raising outside financing (in addition to your own cash) shouldn't be a huge barrier. Likewise, I doubt Uri will have a hard time with that 32-year cutoff now that he's had a $1.1 billion exit.

What a silly thing to have a 'cut off' age for techies. Like a good Single Malt or Wine, we get better and better with time. Age delivers on certain pragmatism not found in the youth of today :)

Link to the said comment please. I'm unable to find it.

> Asset management is (approximately) a fix cost business to run

It is, but not an overly expensive one. I worked for a couple of years in an asset management operation where we managed a variety of funds, all with different risk-return mixes. The smallest fund was a few hundred thousand pounds, the largest around three billion. Total assets under management were about five billion pounds, the most complex of which was a pension fund.

Front office consisted myself (the most junior member of the front office) plus 4 others, including the chief investment manager. Middle office consisted one person who was also the back office manager, and back office, including the department secretary, was four people.

Total department budget was less than a million per year - including office rent, taxes, information services (Bloomberg, Datastream, etc) yet we substantially outperformed (usually within one standard deviation, occasionally outside) performance and risk budgets, as they were defined to us by trustees. And we worked eight hour days, a rarity in the City at any institution.

In hindsight, what we did was quite simple - invest in what we thought was wise, and not worry too much. Much mainstream investment management seems to be embodiment-in-large of the Peter Principal: create work in order to seem busy / important. The upside of the Peter Principal is to collect large bonuses by virtue of seeming important, of which none of us did, as it was simply a job - look after the organisation's funds and the pensioners' pensions. This organisation was somewhat unique in both mandate and people attracted to it.

tl;dr Fund management costs, for a collection of a pretty good performing funds, was 0.02%. This excludes broker fees and management fees of indirectly invested funds.

Byline: I am of course aware that having a single middle office manager is far from ideal, and that the middle office manager managing the back office is bad from an operational control perspective. This was changed after I left.

That's how they described it to me. It was "We can do this, or charge your company a fixed fee per person." I still didn't like it.

Your comment looks really silly in light of the two directly above it.

Uri wasn't full-time at Waze for a while now.. he co-founded Feex almost 2 years ago, and he's also not full time there. He does a lot of angel investments. I don't think that him joining Google was every a possibility.

2-4 years is standard. I bet he left a lot of cash on the table.

It depends. I think acqui-hires have kind of impacted that impression. For larger startups that are acquired many times it's assume that the founder/entrepreneur will not go over with the acquisition. All parties understand they just won't be interested/do well inside a bigger corp. So the COO/CFO/Head of Sales often is the new "number 1" that stays and ensures a smoother transition.

It's hard for me to undertsand if that's what happened here: "After selling map-software provider Waze to Google for $1.1 billion last June, the 49-year-old Israeli decided not to join the ranks of his famous acquirer." that would seem to read like he never went over at all.

It really depends. If Waze was large enough the founder may have been hands off from the engineering side at that point so he wouldn't have much value to Google at that point. Golden handcuffs are usually attached to the employees that have essential technical knowledge.