Sometimes you got to find a way to buy the silence of your top employee, to prevent them from going to the competition. This "start-up" is shallow as hell

Google stock would drop big if this new company was being funded by competitors

and... the VC is Google.

Gotta compensate them somehow.

These people are all already making 9 figure compensation packages, I think if they thought they could do the work they wanted at Google, they would.

9 figure is hardly enough when some kid sells their vscode fork to them for more, is it? Why not just boomerang and get $$$.

Did that really happen? What was the fork you are talking about?

It was a general metaphor but a reference to Windsurf. On the boomerang side, Noam Shazeer went on to do Character AI and came back via acquisition only to leave again to OpenAI.

Given the resources that would be available to them at Google: compute resources, data, etc. It's clear they want absolute freedom. Good for them. At this revolutionary turning point in history, I want the smartest people working in whatever area they want.

compute resources are scarce and folks are fighting over scraps at this point.

For all we know, they could have been successfully working on "10. Prevent Nuclear Terror" for the last 80+ years.