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> However, he continued running the company with new part-time employees, minus original investors and minus the early employees who built the company. Apparent
by whack 6y ago
> However, he continued running the company with new part-time employees, minus original investors and minus the early employees who built the company. Apparently the company succeeded enough that it's now worth $100 million. Early employees who built the original site presumably don’t have equity because they were laid off and their options expired worthless as they were told the company had failed.
Let me start off by saying that I think most startup compensation is downright bad for employees, compared to FANG alternatives. I would like to be a startup founder one day, but I realistically can't see myself as a startup employee.
That said, I don't think Gumroad did anything morally wrong here. The layoffs were absolutely necessary, because the company would have gone bankrupt without them. But it's false to say that this caused employees to have no equity. Even if you get laid off as a startup employee, you can still choose to exercise your options and hold on to the company's equity, if you think that they will eventually be worth $100M. No one misled the employees about the company's future. They saw that the investors were pulling out. They saw that the engineering team was getting shredded. And they made the very reasonable assessment that the company's equity isn't worth the cost of exercising their options.
Blaming Gumroad for employees not having equity, is like blaming AMD for their previous employees selling off their stock during their near-bankruptcy days. Any company can and will go through dramatic reversals of fortune. And whenever there's such a turnaround, there is bound to be people who missed out on the upside, because they didn't continue holding through the dark times.
- adamhp 6y agoI've seen similar sentiment being repeated about Sahil, even by other successful founders like Nathan Berry. It is a bit unfair to look at everything in hindsight and assume Sahil acted maliciously. He did what he could to scrap together the resources to save a failing company. It's not like he ran some sort of shell game to rob the original contributors of their equity. People always view the past in this way and it is incredibly biased. You have to go back and step forward in time with each piece of information as it was available, and at the time it appeared the company was surely going to fail. In any case, I'd be curious to hear from some of the original contributors as to how they felt they were treated or how Sahil behaved.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoFrankly, the investors who set the initial valuation (presumably used to set the strike price of the employee options) and later the $0 valuation (rendering the options worthless) and then giving away the IP that they declared worthless (despite the company not fundamentally changing) deserve a lot of the scrutiny. If the company had simply been left to make their own choices like laying off the employees and buying out investors, this would have been a different story.
- jonfromsf 6y agoI mean strike prices are usually unrealistically LOW, as low as they can be without being fraud. There's a whole industry of 409a valuations that is used to legally say "we're selling preferred stock to investors as a 50MM valuation, but the common stock which represents 80% of the company is only worth 2MM". Founders want strike prices to be low because options are free compensation to employees. The issue is the out-going employees thought that a stake in the business was literally worthless, which turned out not to be true. Very similar to the Blogger story actually.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]