Engineers, come get your $250K salary

Silicon Valley is slowly drifting into the pay model used by sports franchises, with extraordinary salaries for franchise level talent.

Take Instagram, which entered into tech folklore when its 13 employees — only half of whom were developers — created a simple photo-sharing app that wound up getting bought by Facebook for a $1 billion in 2012. WhatsApp took that dynamic even further. With just 32 engineers, the company built a messaging tool that Facebook — once again digging into its considerable coffers — bought for $19 billion in February.

This kind of reward is exactly the kind of incentive that drives companies to compete for the engineering talent that can make a difference in hitting that IPO jackpot.

So it is that one Silicon Valley startup is trying out its own version of shock and awe to grab the attention of the best of the best engineers. Weeby.co, led by a CEO whose technical work is used on more than 2 billion devices worldwide and who has advised more than 100 companies on fundraising, is building an innovative development platform for social games and is offering to pay its engineers an average salary well above market rate: $250,000 a year, or a million dollars over four years, plus equity.

Foolish? Prescient? Let’s see what impact this has on VC-funded startup salaries over the coming year.