Price is what you pay, value is what you get. The price may very well exceed the average engineer. However, the value to Google in incentivizing such leaders t

Price is what you pay, value is what you get. The price may very well exceed the average engineer. However, the value to Google in incentivizing such leaders to drive product development with 100~1000% ROI is that much higher and it's crazy that they have so much cash to do be able to do this. So if I pay you $100 million to make a product and I have a very high likelihood of flipping it for $10 billion for a 100x return, it makes sense why a market for such talent exists at Google. If you think about how large Google is and the amount of innovation that the market expects from them along with the pressure from Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc, $50~200 million is a premium they will gladly pay because this in turn would put pressure on other competitors. Lyft simply would not be able to match Google's offer of $100 million. This is how Google and Microsoft wins most of the time. Cash.