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We've thrown a significant percentage of our lives, and they've only thrown in money Money saved, borrowed, or inherited represents a significant percentage of
by gbacon 8y ago
We've thrown a significant percentage of our lives, and they've only thrown in money
Money saved, borrowed, or inherited represents a significant percentage of someone’s life. Even if you deny this, the money in someone’s pocket in the present represents an enormous percentage of that person’s future life.
Put yourself in the shoes of the owner who took risk up front. Yes, you took some as well, but at any time you could have walked away and accepted another job. If the owner put on chains of debt, walking away means losing a house, other significant assets, or payments for years into the future. If the company is at breakeven and debt was involved up front, not much of it has been retired. The debt may be gone, but memory of the burden and stress is not.
Everyone wants equity. Lots if not all employees feel like the deserve it, even the person who answers the phone and could be most easily replaced. The owner presumably took the risk up front with the objective of making money. To make sense, giving away equity should come with an expectation of adding to the owner’s wealth, not subtracting. Employees and consultants who clock out at the end of the day do not fit this criterion and are already being paid in exchange for their time and effort. The people who will add to the owner’s wealth are the people who will bring in new customers, sell more to existing customers, and generally work on the business — not just in it — to make it more valuable.
- dunpeal 8y ago> Everyone wants equity. Lots if not all employees feel like the deserve it, even the person who answers the phone and could be most easily replaced. This is not a moral question of who deserves what. Compensation is a business issue, not a moral one. The question is whether OP is getting as much as he could get elsewhere, and the answer is likely "no". If startups could compete fair and square with non-startup comp, employees like OP wouldn't be discovering that their equity stake is tiny and they are therefore underpaid after 5 years of working for the same startups every day. > Put yourself in the shoes of the owner who took risk up front. Why should he? Is this "would-be millionaires sympathy hour"? You're saying the founder took more risk. Maybe he did. That's actually not always the case, when you factor in opportunity cost for a non-technical founder vs an engineer - I've seen founders earn as much as they would elsewhere in base salary, without factoring their enormous equity at all. But even if the founder took more risk, how does that compel OP to work hard to make him a millionaire, while foregoing fair market compensation for himself? You are implying it's OP's moral duty to compensate the founder for the supposed risk he may (or may not) have taken. OP's only duty is to do what's best for himself. The founder and investors are certainly doing that by making OP work weekends for what is likely below-market comp.
- gbacon 8y agoNowhere did I suggest any compulsion or moral duty. In fact, I wrote the opposite, namely that employees may walk away at any time. The point of looking at it from the owner’s perspective is to elevate thinking above “It’s so unfair! Harumph!” that is so often the case. As you wrote in your reply, it’s a business decision. Imagining oneself as the owner makes this plain.
- Crye 8y agoOr we can look at it the way it really is. Equity is just a point system which gives people the ability to make decisions and influence our world. They could earned the equity, been given it or just been plain lucky and found it. It literally doesn't matter. They have it now, and we all accept these are the rules. It's just a sorting algorithm we come up with to help efficiently allocate resources.
- gbacon 8y agoEquity is property, a resource to be allocated in some manner, and the earlier comment muses on an allocation that feels unfair emotionally.