The Three Luckiest Guys in Tech Had an Awesome Week
Meet Greg Coleman, Sundar Pichai and Neal Mohan. They are having an awesome week. A week that involves, collectively, roughly $150 million dollars in bonuses; monster severance for short-lived jobs; and orders to report to a new boss in Paris.
It's shaping up as a very nice spring indeed for these Google and AOL working stiffs:
Neal Mohan, Google
Just netted a $100 million stock grant retention bonus from Google to keep him from defecting to Twitter, according to TechCrunch. Mohan is a vice president for product management, in charge of advertising networks like AdSense for text ads and DoubleClick for display ads. Twitter apparently wanted him to lead product development. The $100 million may be incorrect by a few tens of millions of dollars, but it still blows away Google's prior retention bonuses, which we were calling "mental" back when they were only half a million bucks.
Sundar Pichai, Google
He got an offer from Twitter, too, and Google gave him $50 million in stock to stay put, says TechCrunch. Give or take $10 million or $20 million, we presume, but who's counting? Like Mohan, Pichai is a product management VP, with consumer products like Chrome and Google toolbar in his portfolio. Presumably he's grounded enough not to dwell on the fact that he's been valued at $50 million less than fellow VP Mohan. (NB to Pichai: invest in a negotiating tutor. Or, failing that, become one. Either way.)
Greg Coleman, ex AOL
We thought Greg Coleman was lucky when he netted $3 million in AOL severance for 10 weeks work, or about $60,000 per day. Coleman had been hired to run an advertising subsidiary, but was ejected after the AOL CEO who set up the subsidiary was fired two weeks after Coleman's own start date. Coleman eventually landed at the Huffington Post but — you can probably see where this is going — after barely a year on the job found his new company HuffPo had been acquired by his old company AOL. Now he's left with another nice AOL severance check — Kara Swisher at All Things Digital calls it a "huge sum of exit cash" — and has signed on with a Paris based startup. Lucky bastard better bring some goddamned awesome joie de vivre with him to France.
[Photos: Mohan (left) via Jegi.com; Sundar (right) via Niall Kennedy/Flickr; Coleman (center) via Nicki Dugan/Flickr]