21 ms·

I don't really understand why it's framed as withholding equity. It just wasn't offered, totally fair choice by the founders. If you didn't like it, why work th

by extr 5y ago

I don't really understand why it's framed as withholding equity. It just wasn't offered, totally fair choice by the founders. If you didn't like it, why work there?

echelon 5y ago
It's in Atlanta. There wasn't much else at the time, unless you counted Pindrop and AirWatch. Nowadays there are plenty of alternatives in Atlanta and no excuse for subpar comp. There are giant regional Microsoft [1], Google [2], and Facebook [3] offices, and a ton of good startups that offer equity at ATDC [4] and beyond. After it was obvious Mailchimp wasn't the best place to work, I tried to get my Atlanta mailchimp friends to join the then-pre-IPO unicorn I worked at. My equity is now worth eight figures (well, high seven, but I sold some along the way). I worked with someone even luckier who wound up as high C-suite of Greenlight, pre-unicorn status. Again, by not drinking the kool aid and taking charge of their career. Mailchimp underpaid these folks. And all for a shitty PHP stack that spams people. It's a job that's one notch above working at Home Depot or The Weather Channel. Unless you're really happy with what you do (and even if you are), shop around. You owe it to yourself. Microsoft is literally a mile away and will pay so much more. Mailchimp is going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent after these offices come online. There are $300-400k jobs in the city if you look. A good lesson for the Atlanta tech scene. [1] https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/microsoft-announces-major-expansion-in-metro-atlanta https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/microsoft-announces-major-e... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2021/03/23/google-confirms-atlanta-expansion.html https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2021/03/23/google-c... [3] https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/19/21186363/facebook-atlanta-atlantic-station-t3-west-midtown https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/19/21186363/facebook-atlan... [4] https://atdc.org/ https://atdc.org/
- LurkingPenguin 5y ago
  If you offered your friends an opportunity at your company, which based on your comment ostensibly would have paid them more and granted them equity, why did they stay at Mailchimp?
  - echelon 5y ago
    I don't think my friends thought my job was better, despite my regularly selling it. I failed to get them over for a happy hour or tech talk, which would have been a better sell than just talking about comp. Mailchimp was also super "artsy" (they hire artists to do murals), and my friends talked about how cool the founders were. This played the biggest role, I think. They had a mythos.
    - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
      Well it sounds like comp wasn't as important to your friends at that time. If that's changed following Mailchimp's acquisition, that's on them, not Mailchimp.
      - filoleg 5y ago
        Agreed. While the comp situation at MailChimp was subpar due to no-equity component, it isn’t fair to blame them for the outcome of this story here. There were no lies. The employees werent offered equity that ended up being worth nothing. They got job offers that stipulated X cash with no equity, and they willingly and knowingly accepted those offers, and they got compensated as promised. I fail to see how MailChimp is at fault here. The fact that there is Microsoft/Google/etc. and tons of other companies in the vicinity that pay way more, and grandparent poster’s friends still were staying there despite the poster’s urging and advertising, tells more about those friends than Mailchimp.
        esyir 5y ago
        I don't get it. One of the biggest memes around the startup scene is that equity is essentially a lottery ticket, and most lottery tickets don't win. Taking a known cash component with no equity, especially since this is already known and in the open is well established as the safe, "smart" move. Then you see this hullaballoo about not winning the lottery.
        mrgordon 5y ago
- bigiain 5y ago
  I think that's missing the point? Coca Cola weren't and still aren't offering equity. Nobody describes that as "withholding equity". Most places in the world, most jobs do not offer equity as part of compensation. And everybody understands that and chooses too apply or not based on what they are offering for compensation. "pre-IPO unicorns" are very much the exception, very rarely actually pay off, and people who have the opportunity to shop around in that lottery should be grateful but aware that for every guy with an eight figure success story, they're are tens of thousands with some worthless option paperwork that never even made enough money to buy them a meal, let alone a house...
  - caslon 5y ago
    The Coca-Cola Company actually does offer RSUs to employees.
    - akhosravian 5y ago
      I would be surprised if any large publicly traded corporation doesn’t offer some form of equity compensation to basically all employees with a six figure or higher salary. The only lesson here is it is another data point in being very skeptical of someone claiming “we’ll never sell” in a compensation negotiation — if the founder(s) never plan to raise outside money or sell the company there’s very little downside to establishing an employee stock pool and awarding options to folks that may never be exercised.
      - patio11 5y ago
        It is in fact not the practice of most publicly traded companies to award equity outside the tech company, even to highly-compensated employees.
        midasuni 5y ago
        I don’t get a desire for stock - why would I want all my eggs in one basket. If my savings and my income are from the same company, and it does well, that’s great and I make a fortune But if it doesn’t do well, I lose my job and have nothing to fall back on. Surely it’s better to have a diverse portfolio?
- rocqua 5y ago
  Whilst this is totally fair as an assessment, it would still be just as true if mailchimp founders had not sold at all. The current new, at best, puts a fine point on this argument, but it doesn't change anything.
- elif 5y ago
  Wow 7-9 million dollars worth of unsellable Pokemon cards. And to keep them you just have to keep working? Maybe I should work as a unicorn as well!! Oh wait I'd rather rest on my actual cashm
- wing-_-nuts 5y ago
  What resources do you use to better understand the lay of the land in the Atlanta job market? I've been somewhat relying on levels.fyi and blind. I knew about companies like MS, VMware, square, etc. I thought the google office was just for networking stuff. I didn't even know FB had an office here. I'm at that awkward level where I'm paid enough that I'm at the high end of 'normal' comp for local companies. I didn't think there were jobs at the $300k level for ICs in this city though. It appears the market has changed while I wasn't looking.
top_sigrid 5y ago
Yeah, this. You work for a company and agree to do this for amount X in whatever form. If equity is important to you and a company does not offer it, I don't know why the company should be to blame. Of course it's a pity that they could not hold up to their ideals, but I guess no one should be surprised that everybody might have a price tag when talking billions.
imgabe 5y ago
It's framed like that because it gets lots of clicks and generates lots of angry discussion. It has nothing to do with presenting an honest assessment of what happened.
- MichaelZuo 5y ago
  I wish in these cases @dang or another moderator could change the title to be less click-baity.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
I don't think the withholding equity was a problem per se, it's just that the employees were lied to all this time. Not just a white lie, but a lie on a company's founding principles, its building blocks, a core aspect of their personnel's mindset when working for the company. It feels like betrayal. Like Google silently withdrawing their "don't be evil" principle when it turned out they couldn't keep that up with a straight face. And it has cost Google some good employees.
- GiorgioG 5y ago
  People change, their priorities & interests change. They owned the company, they paid their employees salaries - beyond that they owed them nothing unless otherwise negotiated. It just sounds like sour grapes.
  - ecf 5y ago
    > They owned the company, they paid their employees salaries - beyond that they owed them nothing unless otherwise negotiated. I’m sad to hear that is your experience. Perhaps find an employer who wouldn’t treat you like a slave if legally allowed?
    - GiorgioG 5y ago
      > Perhaps find an employer who wouldn’t treat you like a slave if legally allowed? Are you wealthy enough to stop working entirely? If not, you (and most of us) are a slave to the system. Yes you can choose to change employers, but you cannot choose to stop working if you want to eat, have a home, electricity, etc. Employers are not your friend. They don't pay you because they're "nice people".
      - ecf 5y ago
        What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of companies out there which ARE NOT like this, no matter how much you try to say that employers are not your friend. I feel you’ve been involved in some exploitative workplaces in the past that have pessimistically shaped your view of business. With that being said, I’m still youngish and I’m probably naive. Maybe I’ll become a jaded capitalist too when I’m older.
Jenk 5y ago
I'm confused.. it fits the literal definition of withholding: > To refrain from giving or granting: synonym: keep.
- imgabe 5y ago
  Words have both connotations and denotations. The denotation is the literal dictionary definition. The connotation is the associated meaning that comes to people’s minds. The connotation of “withholding“ is to prevent someone from getting something they are owed. Business Insider wants to imply that MC employees were owed equity, despite MC being clear and upfront about the fact this was not offered. This way, many thousands of aggrieved employees who are unsatisfied with their career decisions and seeking someone to blame will click on the article and feel like they are victims of an unjust system. This will generate many pageviews and therefore revenue for Business Insider.
khazhoux 5y ago
Because while you're strictly right, in a legal and facts-on-the-ground sense, there's an element of trust in these decisions. And the (not-legally-binding) concept of "we're in this together" is part of the startup story, and part of the pitch that company owners use to attract employees away from other high-compensation opportunities. Employees regularly (as in, basically always) join startups for peanuts in equity compared to the equity held by founders. And they're told "we're in this together, we'll win or lose together"... without realizing that the stock they received was so tiny, that the founders' Win means a private island and trust-fund grandchildren, while their own Win will be one fifth of a down payment on a house, even in the best outcome. The cap table isn't revealed to job candidates, but they still get vague reassurances that they're being offered a "great package." If they saw how their package compared to the founders' holdings, I think employees would demand a hell of a lot more equity, for the risk they take.
- WalterBright 5y ago
  > without realizing that the stock they received was so tiny, that the founders' Win means a private island and trust-fund grandchildren, while their own Win will be one fifth of a down payment on a house, even in the best outcome. With 1200 employees, your share will inevitably be a tiny fraction.
  - khazhoux 5y ago
    At that scale, of course. But what I observe is that the inequity (through lack of information) starts at day one: the first employee (often for a startup with zero code written yet) signs up for 1% because this is "industry standard" and because they believe that the investors and option pool is the bulk of the remaining 99% -- not realizing that the two founders might hold 80% of stock. And the inequity keeps propagating: the fifth employee agrees to 1/20th of what the first employee had, and so forth. I really think non-founding employees (especially early ones) would be shocked if they saw what the cap table really looked like when they signed up.
    - WalterBright 5y ago

by extr 5y ago

I don't really understand why it's framed as withholding equity. It just wasn't offered, totally fair choice by the founders. If you didn't like it, why work there?

echelon 5y ago

It's in Atlanta. There wasn't much else at the time, unless you counted Pindrop and AirWatch. Nowadays there are plenty of alternatives in Atlanta and no excuse for subpar comp. There are giant regional Microsoft [1], Google [2], and Facebook [3] offices, and a ton of good startups that offer equity at ATDC [4] and beyond. After it was obvious Mailchimp wasn't the best place to work, I tried to get my Atlanta mailchimp friends to join the then-pre-IPO unicorn I worked at. My equity is now worth eight figures (well, high seven, but I sold some along the way). I worked with someone even luckier who wound up as high C-suite of Greenlight, pre-unicorn status. Again, by not drinking the kool aid and taking charge of their career. Mailchimp underpaid these folks. And all for a shitty PHP stack that spams people. It's a job that's one notch above working at Home Depot or The Weather Channel. Unless you're really happy with what you do (and even if you are), shop around. You owe it to yourself. Microsoft is literally a mile away and will pay so much more. Mailchimp is going to be scraping the bottom of the barrel for talent after these offices come online. There are $300-400k jobs in the city if you look. A good lesson for the Atlanta tech scene. [1] https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/microsoft-announces-major-expansion-in-metro-atlanta https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/microsoft-announces-major-e... [2] https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2021/03/23/google-confirms-atlanta-expansion.html https://www.bizjournals.com/atlanta/news/2021/03/23/google-c... [3] https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/19/21186363/facebook-atlanta-atlantic-station-t3-west-midtown https://atlanta.curbed.com/2020/3/19/21186363/facebook-atlan... [4] https://atdc.org/ https://atdc.org/

LurkingPenguin 5y ago
If you offered your friends an opportunity at your company, which based on your comment ostensibly would have paid them more and granted them equity, why did they stay at Mailchimp?
- echelon 5y ago
  I don't think my friends thought my job was better, despite my regularly selling it. I failed to get them over for a happy hour or tech talk, which would have been a better sell than just talking about comp. Mailchimp was also super "artsy" (they hire artists to do murals), and my friends talked about how cool the founders were. This played the biggest role, I think. They had a mythos.
  - LurkingPenguin 5y ago
    Well it sounds like comp wasn't as important to your friends at that time. If that's changed following Mailchimp's acquisition, that's on them, not Mailchimp.
    - filoleg 5y ago
      Agreed. While the comp situation at MailChimp was subpar due to no-equity component, it isn’t fair to blame them for the outcome of this story here. There were no lies. The employees werent offered equity that ended up being worth nothing. They got job offers that stipulated X cash with no equity, and they willingly and knowingly accepted those offers, and they got compensated as promised. I fail to see how MailChimp is at fault here. The fact that there is Microsoft/Google/etc. and tons of other companies in the vicinity that pay way more, and grandparent poster’s friends still were staying there despite the poster’s urging and advertising, tells more about those friends than Mailchimp.
      - esyir 5y ago
        I don't get it. One of the biggest memes around the startup scene is that equity is essentially a lottery ticket, and most lottery tickets don't win. Taking a known cash component with no equity, especially since this is already known and in the open is well established as the safe, "smart" move. Then you see this hullaballoo about not winning the lottery.
        mrgordon 5y ago
bigiain 5y ago
I think that's missing the point? Coca Cola weren't and still aren't offering equity. Nobody describes that as "withholding equity". Most places in the world, most jobs do not offer equity as part of compensation. And everybody understands that and chooses too apply or not based on what they are offering for compensation. "pre-IPO unicorns" are very much the exception, very rarely actually pay off, and people who have the opportunity to shop around in that lottery should be grateful but aware that for every guy with an eight figure success story, they're are tens of thousands with some worthless option paperwork that never even made enough money to buy them a meal, let alone a house...
- caslon 5y ago
  The Coca-Cola Company actually does offer RSUs to employees.
  - akhosravian 5y ago
    I would be surprised if any large publicly traded corporation doesn’t offer some form of equity compensation to basically all employees with a six figure or higher salary. The only lesson here is it is another data point in being very skeptical of someone claiming “we’ll never sell” in a compensation negotiation — if the founder(s) never plan to raise outside money or sell the company there’s very little downside to establishing an employee stock pool and awarding options to folks that may never be exercised.
    - patio11 5y ago
      It is in fact not the practice of most publicly traded companies to award equity outside the tech company, even to highly-compensated employees.
      - midasuni 5y ago
        I don’t get a desire for stock - why would I want all my eggs in one basket. If my savings and my income are from the same company, and it does well, that’s great and I make a fortune But if it doesn’t do well, I lose my job and have nothing to fall back on. Surely it’s better to have a diverse portfolio?
rocqua 5y ago
Whilst this is totally fair as an assessment, it would still be just as true if mailchimp founders had not sold at all. The current new, at best, puts a fine point on this argument, but it doesn't change anything.
elif 5y ago
Wow 7-9 million dollars worth of unsellable Pokemon cards. And to keep them you just have to keep working? Maybe I should work as a unicorn as well!! Oh wait I'd rather rest on my actual cashm
wing-_-nuts 5y ago
What resources do you use to better understand the lay of the land in the Atlanta job market? I've been somewhat relying on levels.fyi and blind. I knew about companies like MS, VMware, square, etc. I thought the google office was just for networking stuff. I didn't even know FB had an office here. I'm at that awkward level where I'm paid enough that I'm at the high end of 'normal' comp for local companies. I didn't think there were jobs at the $300k level for ICs in this city though. It appears the market has changed while I wasn't looking.

top_sigrid 5y ago

Yeah, this. You work for a company and agree to do this for amount X in whatever form. If equity is important to you and a company does not offer it, I don't know why the company should be to blame. Of course it's a pity that they could not hold up to their ideals, but I guess no one should be surprised that everybody might have a price tag when talking billions.

imgabe 5y ago

It's framed like that because it gets lots of clicks and generates lots of angry discussion. It has nothing to do with presenting an honest assessment of what happened.

MichaelZuo 5y ago
I wish in these cases @dang or another moderator could change the title to be less click-baity.

Cthulhu_ 5y ago

I don't think the withholding equity was a problem per se, it's just that the employees were lied to all this time. Not just a white lie, but a lie on a company's founding principles, its building blocks, a core aspect of their personnel's mindset when working for the company. It feels like betrayal. Like Google silently withdrawing their "don't be evil" principle when it turned out they couldn't keep that up with a straight face. And it has cost Google some good employees.

GiorgioG 5y ago
People change, their priorities & interests change. They owned the company, they paid their employees salaries - beyond that they owed them nothing unless otherwise negotiated. It just sounds like sour grapes.
- ecf 5y ago
  > They owned the company, they paid their employees salaries - beyond that they owed them nothing unless otherwise negotiated. I’m sad to hear that is your experience. Perhaps find an employer who wouldn’t treat you like a slave if legally allowed?
  - GiorgioG 5y ago
    > Perhaps find an employer who wouldn’t treat you like a slave if legally allowed? Are you wealthy enough to stop working entirely? If not, you (and most of us) are a slave to the system. Yes you can choose to change employers, but you cannot choose to stop working if you want to eat, have a home, electricity, etc. Employers are not your friend. They don't pay you because they're "nice people".
    - ecf 5y ago
      What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t have to be this way. There are plenty of companies out there which ARE NOT like this, no matter how much you try to say that employers are not your friend. I feel you’ve been involved in some exploitative workplaces in the past that have pessimistically shaped your view of business. With that being said, I’m still youngish and I’m probably naive. Maybe I’ll become a jaded capitalist too when I’m older.

Jenk 5y ago

I'm confused.. it fits the literal definition of withholding: > To refrain from giving or granting: synonym: keep.

imgabe 5y ago
Words have both connotations and denotations. The denotation is the literal dictionary definition. The connotation is the associated meaning that comes to people’s minds. The connotation of “withholding“ is to prevent someone from getting something they are owed. Business Insider wants to imply that MC employees were owed equity, despite MC being clear and upfront about the fact this was not offered. This way, many thousands of aggrieved employees who are unsatisfied with their career decisions and seeking someone to blame will click on the article and feel like they are victims of an unjust system. This will generate many pageviews and therefore revenue for Business Insider.

khazhoux 5y ago

Because while you're strictly right, in a legal and facts-on-the-ground sense, there's an element of trust in these decisions. And the (not-legally-binding) concept of "we're in this together" is part of the startup story, and part of the pitch that company owners use to attract employees away from other high-compensation opportunities. Employees regularly (as in, basically always) join startups for peanuts in equity compared to the equity held by founders. And they're told "we're in this together, we'll win or lose together"... without realizing that the stock they received was so tiny, that the founders' Win means a private island and trust-fund grandchildren, while their own Win will be one fifth of a down payment on a house, even in the best outcome. The cap table isn't revealed to job candidates, but they still get vague reassurances that they're being offered a "great package." If they saw how their package compared to the founders' holdings, I think employees would demand a hell of a lot more equity, for the risk they take.

WalterBright 5y ago
> without realizing that the stock they received was so tiny, that the founders' Win means a private island and trust-fund grandchildren, while their own Win will be one fifth of a down payment on a house, even in the best outcome. With 1200 employees, your share will inevitably be a tiny fraction.
- khazhoux 5y ago
  At that scale, of course. But what I observe is that the inequity (through lack of information) starts at day one: the first employee (often for a startup with zero code written yet) signs up for 1% because this is "industry standard" and because they believe that the investors and option pool is the bulk of the remaining 99% -- not realizing that the two founders might hold 80% of stock. And the inequity keeps propagating: the fifth employee agrees to 1/20th of what the first employee had, and so forth. I really think non-founding employees (especially early ones) would be shocked if they saw what the cap table really looked like when they signed up.
  - WalterBright 5y ago