6 ms·

Ellen Pao still chasing clout, I see -- no better way than riling up the Twitter masses. So what if employees have no equity? The business was profitable enough

• arglebarglegar 5y ago
  eh, her reddit tenure is questionable for many reasons (not just of her making)
• benatkin 5y ago
  This isn't reddit. A reddit villain isn't automatically a HN villain. Also, she wasn't universally disliked there, and it's been a few years since she left.
  • xwdv 5y ago
    Doesn’t matter. HN is simply a more well behaved Reddit with a higher average intelligence per user. From reading the room I’d say Ellen Pao is typically seen as a minor villain around here. Definitely not a hero.
• fragmede 5y ago
  Ad homonym attack against the messenger doesn't address the substance of the objection. In this case, I'd rather get $3 million vs *not* getting $3 million (which seems like a not-unreasonable payout for an early senior engineer at a startup with a $12b exit). You can argue that they knew what they were getting into, but that's still gotta leave a bitter taste for some.
  • dvt 5y ago
    > Ad homonym attack against the messenger doesn't address the substance of the objection. There is no substance to the objection. They aren't entitled to anything, they didn't negotiate anything, and they shouldn't get anything. Her argument is akin to saying that the Uber driver that dropped me off at the gas station is entitled to part of my lottery winnings because the ticket I bought happened to have the jackpot numbers. The position is both logically inconsistent and severely asymmetrical—we are only talking about this because MailChimp did have a successful exit, not because they failed miserably (as literally hundreds of startups do on a yearly basis). Even as a staunch capitalist, I'll be the first to say there are plenty of problems with corporate tax law, offshore tax havens, money laundering, etc. But this ain't one.
  • indigochill 5y ago
    The objection barely warrants addressing. A founder says "I'm keeping the equity and I'll pay you X salary." Employee says "OK." Nobody's exploiting anyone in that exchange. At a point in time before Mailchimp was clearly a success (and thus equity would actually be worth something), most engineers would jump at a salary-over-equity compensation scheme because it's common knowledge (at least around here) that equity is a lottery ticket that usually doesn't pay off.
  • deckard1 5y ago
    You either get in as employee #3 with real equity, or you join as employee #5000 with good salary, benefits, stability, and work/life balance. Anything else and you're a chump. Since there are a whole lot of employee #50, and #35, and #110s out there apparently many people really don't know what they are getting into.
    • mlinsey 5y ago
      I dunno if I agree with this. If you're early on in your career, jumping in as employee #20 can be an optimal time to learn a whole lot by working directly with all the key senior people in the company. If you're later on in your career, an employee #20 is likely jumping on board to work with people they know and trust. From a strict compensation perspective, you are probably right, but even then, it is probably less stark than it was ten years ago, what with seed rounds and series A sizes being so massive that salaries are a bit more reasonable at this stage too.
  • forgingahead 5y ago
    I often see the comment on HN that "equity is worthless, make sure your cash salary accounts for that". So when that was done here, why the sour grapes? As another commenter pointed out, there was obviously a fair agreement here: work for Mailchimp at X salary and no equity, or don't. Nobody was forced into anything, and if no equity was offered, then I'm sure the salaries had to be competitive in the market. Nobody would be stupid enough to work for them otherwise.
  • singlow 5y ago
    Ad hominem - amusing error though, to use homonym in place of its own homophone :)
    • devenvdev 5y ago
      Even more amusing that your comment can be considered ad hominem itself, which makes it a strange loop ;)
      • devenvdev 5y ago
        Clarification as my parent comment gets downvoted: there is a good HN rule - "assume good faith". In my comment I haven't claimed that the parent comment was ad hominem, I just claimed that if it would be considered as ad hominem it would create what's called a "strange loop", which is amusing (as all strange loops are amusing IMO).
• w0mbat 5y ago
  The company is paying out $300M in employee bonuses instead. https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499 https://twitter.com/Shubham/status/1437532055173226499 Ellen Pao sucks. Didn't she fire a Reddit employee who had cancer?
  • nobrains 5y ago
    800 employees, per google search. So, USD 375,000 per employee on average. Not a bad payout for the employees.
• syshum 5y ago
  >>The business was profitable enough to pay them a fair market salary, it's not like they were indentured servants. What stops them from building their own $12B exit? That is the thing, we are seeing an extreme negative view of basic capitalism, people tend to believe founders and capital have no value believing in a socialist utopia where by all the workers get an equal share of the "means of production"
• wilsynet 5y ago
  Ellen Pao made a statement of fact, that rank and file “employees have no equity”. There was no criticism or attack fundamental to the factual statement itself.
  • valzam 5y ago
    Of course it was meant as a criticism, why else would she post that?
    • wilsynet 5y ago
      What is the basis of the criticism? The employees of MailChimp knowingly and willingly entered into an employment relationship that did not include equity in its compensation. They have no reason to be unhappy and MailChimp doesn’t owe them anything other than the salary and profit sharing that was promised. Regardless of who the new owners of MailChimp are. There are multiple other possible motivations for Ellen’s post other than criticism.
• trhway 5y ago
  >Ellen Pao still chasing clout, I see -- no better way than riling up the Twitter masses. and this is why i'm against unions in tech - the people like she will be the bosses.
• umeshunni 5y ago
  It's simpler than that - she's a VC and is raging about the fact that Mailchip isn't owned by any VCs.