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I worked at MailChimp for a few years. I most recently worked at a company that went through an IPO that I had equity in. When deciding to join my recent compan

I worked at MailChimp for a few years. I most recently worked at a company that went through an IPO that I had equity in. When deciding to join my recent company, equity was the largest factor in my move. MC’s benefits are great and at the time were top-tier in Atlanta. They are cash/401k heavy and offer great profit sharing incentives. They also make it abundantly clear that they don’t offer equity and when I negotiated my non-MC offer that I ended up accepting, they were clear that they could not match my equity. They even acknowledged that if I was willing to take a risk with the equity it would likely be the advantageous move to make. Nonetheless, during my time at MC Ben/Dan repeatedly boasted about turning down offers to sell and repeated they were never intending to go that (or the publicly traded) route. This ultimately factored into my decision to leave, as it never appeared I would have a personal stake in the company. I hope other employees interpreted this in a similar manner and I do believe everyone had abundant opportunities to do so. In the end and in hindsight, I’m happy with my decision to leave and it did pay out. Nonetheless, I do still believe MC is a great company and despite the founders somewhat selling an incorrect vision, are still acting in good faith. I don’t believe they “withheld equity” as they made it explicitly clear it was never offered, or was ever going to be, but I do see how the boasting of never selling out could be interpreted poorly now in hindsight.

dcow 5y ago
This is perhaps simply a good reminder that everyone has a price and nothing is set in stone. If you’re in a position of leadership, be humble and real. If you’re an employee, don’t be naive. The market has the last word.
- amznbyebyebye 5y ago
  The capitalism machine doesn’t care about your humility or integrity even- only that you obey the letter of the law. I learned that the hard way, work isn’t a religion with morals, it’s work and there are rules. Your second point however, “don’t be naive” agree 100%
  - dcow 5y ago
    The first point is not about appeasing the machine… it’s about not overselling to your subordinate worker class because if they take the second point to heart they won’t buy it anyway. Just be honest and realistic and you’ll avoid looking like a crook, if you care. Maybe you don’t—you’re right such behavior is allowed in the rules.
  - midasuni 5y ago
    > obey the letter of the law. Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. Breaking the law for a company is simple a cost of doing business. If that costs too ouch then the lobbying/bribe budget increases to cancel it out m, but most of the time it’s just a line of risk on the balance sheet.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      In other words, for companies, the law is a continuous function, where for individuals it's a discrete one. Where you and me have to ask ourselves, "do I break the law or not?", big companies ask themselves, "what is the optimal level of law breakage?".
      - tempestn 5y ago
        I'd argue it's not even quite that. Common law is not perfectly defined. So there aren't really levels of 'law breakage', but rather something more like, "what's the likelihood the potential legal costs of this outweigh the benefit?"
      - jacquesm 5y ago
        For some individuals it isn't even that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543096
      - andrewingram 5y ago
        Or at least, which laws will someone go to jail for breaking vs us just getting slapped with a fine?
- touisteur 5y ago
  And. Things and people can change their minds. Promises, absolutes or forevers should come with some kind of enforcing mechanism to be really, permanently trusted. And even then, beware of the penalty not being 'high enough'. But it's OK. It was very naive to say 'never' and it was a bit naive to take it at face value. As long as they paid their employees well and treated them with respect, and were clear of their prospects, I fail to see who is hurt here ? Except customers being now under the Intuit umbrella, that must hurt...
  - kokey 5y ago
    I think what changed their mind was that the market changed. Mailchimp was run like a company that wanted to prevail in the market and not just grow and sell. That affected their strategy in a good way since it allowed them to spend time improving their services long term, but most importantly it prevented them from trying to grow aggressively for the sake of growing, which is a very very bad idea when it comes to sending bulk email. In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. There's a point where an industry that stops growing fast eventually consolidates and it tends to get absorbed by groups that has other revenue streams.
    - louisswiss 5y ago
      > In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).
      - telesilla 5y ago
        Same experience for us. While we moved away from Mailchimp recently for Pardot, email marketing is huge growth area for us since the start of the pandemic. I think it's a combination of people seeking new solutions to this new world we live in, and understanding that if each email we send has a genuine value for who we send it to, they are very receptive. It's the opposite of spam, as we're asked more and more to please keep our customers up to date with the latest trends.
- Barrin92 5y ago
  feel compelled to shout out Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VLC) who refused to sell the project for 'several tens of millions' which makes me pretty confident that there's still people out there who will stick to their principles
  - SergeAx 5y ago
    I am sure that MailChimp founders were sincere in their unwillingness to sell company. But 12 billions is 12 billions. I am sure that author of VLC would sell his product for much bigger money, the only problem that there's no one to offer him bigger money.
    - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
      >I am sure that author of VLC would sell his product for much bigger money, the only problem that there's no one to offer him bigger money. I don't know, having billions looks like a liability to me.
      - SergeAx 5y ago
        I don't think that we may classify big money as liability. Usually you cannot quickly get rid of your liability for free.
        tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/07/28/15-downsides-to-being-rich.aspx https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/07/28/15-downsides-to-b...
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I’d be willing to risk that liability.
      - jacobr1 5y ago
        It is, but it also a liability you can afford to pay others to manage in detail.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  Our largest competitor, who had 10x our revenue, got bought about 6 years ago by some huge international behemoth, which of course ran it into the ground over the course of a few years. Great for us, as we got almost all of their customers. I recently heard the story of how that happened. The original founders had no intention of selling out, and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control. Well, the multinational company offered the ridiculously high price, and the original founders had no chance to make a higher offer. So they lost "their baby", which is now just a pale shadow of what it once was. The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story. It must be disheartening though, to see something you created get run into the ground.
    - corobo 5y ago
      Am I the only one that would love that situation to be able to start a new thing on easy mode? You know a lot of the failures, you now have a massive network, you have a big wad of cash. Bust out the idea bin and make something else!
      - andi999 5y ago
        Having a lot of cash is not a good position to start a new product (your pivots will most likely be delayed due to that)
        corobo 5y ago
        Ok fair enough I'd also definitely have to pass on dealing with that to an accountant but I more mean being able to work on it full time with no financial concern than chucking a milly after each idea Also to clarify on the seeming heartless I sort of see things as being diluted when others work on them -- in a good way! -- for each person that adds to your thing it goes from mine to our. Long enough and big enough and it's more other people's creativity than yours. Your baby is all grown up and ready to do it's own thing
- wolverine876 5y ago
  > The market has the last word. I think that's a bias of hindsight, something people say after seeing it happen in a particular situation. In other situations, principles, promises, and other factors have the last word.
emodendroket 5y ago
Well, for every MailChimp there are several whose equity is worthless. If the company is not public I barely consider equity at all.
- Vadoff 5y ago
  You might as well ignore private companies altogether then, as the total compensation will be much less than public ones without equity factored in.
  - emodendroket 5y ago
    Well I now work at a big company everybody has heard of so I guess you’re right.
bpodgursky 5y ago
$12 billion is a staggering amount of money. I can't imagine blaming someone for shifting their stance on an exit after imagining what they could fund with a $12 billion payout. If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  > If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely. it's an email service provider for campaigns and other email spam with a recognizable brand, let's not imagine that this is beneficial beyond helping companies market stuff to people. It's like a meta-business enhancement service. Happy for the founders, hope they do some good with the new payout - but I think you are giving them a bit too much credit. Sure, kick back 100M to your old school district, maybe another 250M to BLM or to Math for America to strike off all of your philanthropic efforts in one go, curate some plebeian sympathies and smile for the cameras but at the end of the day, making it easy to bombard people with endless email campaigns isn't exactly solving global problems EDIT: I reject hero worship vigorously - Mailchimp did a thing, it made money, and another entity that did a thing and made money that makes MORE money decided to absorb it and the cash payout was so good that investors/founders of MC decided to say fuck it, I'm done. Take my chips, gimme the loot. 12 billion dollars is generational wealth, but I mean I just can't/won't/don't respect people that have enabled spam or a business model that encourages bombarding people with BS. Same thing with IAP - I don't respect people who work for Apple because there was a layered hierarchy of priorities that said "we want to generate revenue at the expense of the people that trust us with their consumer electronics" I just intrinsically cannot respect people that decide to profit off of wasting people's time, the only commodity you can't generate more of. Instead of craftsmanship we have psychopathic operators that try to fine tune all the ways to extract money from others and even develop meta-endeavors where people pay others to execute activities to get end-user observers ('users' in modern web dev parlance, for the JS devs) to waste time/spend money, for net negative expected value to themselves and others. It's super sordid and I just can't endorse it. Whatever. In 25 years these guys will probably pull a Paul Allen and then start funding brain research or something after realizing that all the money in the world can't buy time and more life.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
> could be interpreted poorly now Yes doing the exact opposite of what you have always said tends to do that.
akudha 5y ago
People in positions of authority need to be careful with their words. They might not be intentionally misleading, but it is possible that they make a remark without thinking it through and others end up believing. It happened to me. The CTO of the company I worked for moved to another company and recruited a bunch of us from his previous job. He made tall promises, none of which worked out. We were annoyed at the time, but I now realize he didn't intentionally mislead us - he was just overly optimistic about his abilities and his own faith in the new company he joined. It was a disaster for everyone he recruited from his previous job. Everybody has a price, everyone has a breaking point.
statictype 5y ago
This is a very reasonable and nuanced take. Thanks for sharing.
brightball 5y ago
About 10 years ago I remember visiting a dev company that shared a building with MailChimp (I think it was called High Groove). I just remember them talking about how MC was rolling in money and essentially looking for things to spend on. Said they’d brought in consultants and spent a fortune redesigning their whole office space, etc. I have no idea what compensation over there looked like, but I can’t imagine that it was anything less than stellar. I’ve always been of the impression that equity is what you hand out when you can’t afford to compensate people enough otherwise. If they are paying well, not handing out equity seems like a perfectly normal move.
tinyhouse 5y ago
The fact they didn't give equity to employees is totally OK. It's their company, they don't have to share it with nobody. It can still be a great place to work with great benefits. I worked for a place like that early in my career. But when you sell for $12B and didn't take investment so all goes directly to you, how can you not allocate at least a million for each employee and change their life? With 1200 employees that's only $1.2B. They can easily give everyone even $2M and have zero impact of their life. What two people can do with $12B which they cannot do with $9B? (Yes I know, the final amount is much less after taxes, fees, etc) Obv they don't need to allocate money equally, it makes more sense to do it based on tenure.
- itsdrewmiller 5y ago
  sounds like they allocated 500 million between RSUs and cash bonuses, which is about 400k per employee.
  - tinyhouse 5y ago
    That's great! I still think it's too low.
  - billyhoffman 5y ago
    RSUs are *never* distributed equally. That’s not their point because they are entirely separate from the purchase of the acquired companies equity. The point of RSUs is to retain talent that is deemed critical to making the acquisition successful. Your VP of finance isn’t getting any RSUs. The acquiring company probably doesn’t need her, and she possesses no critical knowledge that any other senior financial person doesn’t also possess. Individual developers often get higher RSUs than managers. Why? More experience with the code and domain knowledge, especially if the engineering manager wasn’t an IC who grew into the role.
- the_jeremy 5y ago
  You're right. Jeff Bezos could give >$100k to every Amazon employee and only be giving away the money he's gained during the pandemic[0]. How can he not allocate at least 100k for each employee and change a lot of lives? He could easily give everyone this and have zero impact on this life. What can he do with $200B that he could not do with $100B? I could easily give away $10k to charity and save multiple lives[1] without impacting my quality of life, and given that you are on HN, you likely have $10k you could live without as well. We are literally choosing to have money in some retirement account over saving lives - why would you expect founders to give away money just to make rich tech workers more rich? [0]: https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-save-a-life-for-333706-and-thats-a-steal-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-...
jollybean 5y ago
" This ultimately factored into my decision to leave, as it never appeared I would have a personal stake in the company." You had a 'stake' it was just in terms of other kinds of benefits. If you join a company after it's well-established, then for the most part, unless it's an 'extremely high growth company' - your stock package isn't going to be worth that much, it's just part of comp. If you joined MC several years after founding, even if they did give you equity, it would be a bit of a nice bonus, and that is all.
mandeepj 5y ago
> When deciding to join my recent company, equity was the largest factor in my move. Great, it worked out for you. A friend of mine, recently got an offer from a pre-IPO company. He asked for equity, but they are refusing to share any numbers - saying - their lawyers asked them to not do that. Is it normal?
- bradstewart 5y ago
  No. Under no circumstances should you accept an offer when a company refuses to give you any sort of context for what your grant might be worth.
- jacobr1 5y ago
  Frustratingly so. Getting an offer of a number of shares, without any context on the total number outstanding or recent valuations, doesn't provide you with the ability to calculate future upsides. Though even if you get those numbers, it is much rarer for things like preferred shares and any liquidity multiple they might have, which can screw over the common holders even is successful exits.
  - silexia 5y ago
    As the owner of a company, I can tell you that any company that will not give you all the financial information necessary to value your shares and know what it's worth is scamming you.
  - x0x0 5y ago
    They have to tell you at least the 409a or a similar valuation -- it's the strike on the grant.
- wavefunction 5y ago
  I can't speak to whether it's normal but it's a red flag for me. One of the companies I've worked for was pre-IPO and went IPO while I was there and when they hired me two years before that IPO they laid out the vesting schedule (1 year cliff, then monthly vesting of the remaining 3/4s of options) along with the strike price of the options along with how that strike price/valuation was calculated. Other places have had varying levels of professionalism like that but that was the only place that ended up IPOing and I believe there is a correlation between the professionalism of laying out clear compensation and the actual performance of the rest of the company.

dcow 5y ago

This is perhaps simply a good reminder that everyone has a price and nothing is set in stone. If you’re in a position of leadership, be humble and real. If you’re an employee, don’t be naive. The market has the last word.

amznbyebyebye 5y ago
The capitalism machine doesn’t care about your humility or integrity even- only that you obey the letter of the law. I learned that the hard way, work isn’t a religion with morals, it’s work and there are rules. Your second point however, “don’t be naive” agree 100%
- dcow 5y ago
  The first point is not about appeasing the machine… it’s about not overselling to your subordinate worker class because if they take the second point to heart they won’t buy it anyway. Just be honest and realistic and you’ll avoid looking like a crook, if you care. Maybe you don’t—you’re right such behavior is allowed in the rules.
- midasuni 5y ago
  > obey the letter of the law. Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder. Breaking the law for a company is simple a cost of doing business. If that costs too ouch then the lobbying/bribe budget increases to cancel it out m, but most of the time it’s just a line of risk on the balance sheet.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    In other words, for companies, the law is a continuous function, where for individuals it's a discrete one. Where you and me have to ask ourselves, "do I break the law or not?", big companies ask themselves, "what is the optimal level of law breakage?".
    - tempestn 5y ago
      I'd argue it's not even quite that. Common law is not perfectly defined. So there aren't really levels of 'law breakage', but rather something more like, "what's the likelihood the potential legal costs of this outweigh the benefit?"
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      For some individuals it isn't even that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543096 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543096
    - andrewingram 5y ago
      Or at least, which laws will someone go to jail for breaking vs us just getting slapped with a fine?
touisteur 5y ago
And. Things and people can change their minds. Promises, absolutes or forevers should come with some kind of enforcing mechanism to be really, permanently trusted. And even then, beware of the penalty not being 'high enough'. But it's OK. It was very naive to say 'never' and it was a bit naive to take it at face value. As long as they paid their employees well and treated them with respect, and were clear of their prospects, I fail to see who is hurt here ? Except customers being now under the Intuit umbrella, that must hurt...
- kokey 5y ago
  I think what changed their mind was that the market changed. Mailchimp was run like a company that wanted to prevail in the market and not just grow and sell. That affected their strategy in a good way since it allowed them to spend time improving their services long term, but most importantly it prevented them from trying to grow aggressively for the sake of growing, which is a very very bad idea when it comes to sending bulk email. In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. There's a point where an industry that stops growing fast eventually consolidates and it tends to get absorbed by groups that has other revenue streams.
  - louisswiss 5y ago
    > In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).
    - telesilla 5y ago
      Same experience for us. While we moved away from Mailchimp recently for Pardot, email marketing is huge growth area for us since the start of the pandemic. I think it's a combination of people seeking new solutions to this new world we live in, and understanding that if each email we send has a genuine value for who we send it to, they are very receptive. It's the opposite of spam, as we're asked more and more to please keep our customers up to date with the latest trends.
Barrin92 5y ago
feel compelled to shout out Jean-Baptiste Kempf (VLC) who refused to sell the project for 'several tens of millions' which makes me pretty confident that there's still people out there who will stick to their principles
- SergeAx 5y ago
  I am sure that MailChimp founders were sincere in their unwillingness to sell company. But 12 billions is 12 billions. I am sure that author of VLC would sell his product for much bigger money, the only problem that there's no one to offer him bigger money.
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    >I am sure that author of VLC would sell his product for much bigger money, the only problem that there's no one to offer him bigger money. I don't know, having billions looks like a liability to me.
    - SergeAx 5y ago
      I don't think that we may classify big money as liability. Usually you cannot quickly get rid of your liability for free.
      - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
        https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/07/28/15-downsides-to-being-rich.aspx https://www.fool.com/retirement/2019/07/28/15-downsides-to-b...
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I’d be willing to risk that liability.
    - jacobr1 5y ago
      It is, but it also a liability you can afford to pay others to manage in detail.
magicalhippo 5y ago
Our largest competitor, who had 10x our revenue, got bought about 6 years ago by some huge international behemoth, which of course ran it into the ground over the course of a few years. Great for us, as we got almost all of their customers. I recently heard the story of how that happened. The original founders had no intention of selling out, and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control. Well, the multinational company offered the ridiculously high price, and the original founders had no chance to make a higher offer. So they lost "their baby", which is now just a pale shadow of what it once was. The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  >The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story. It must be disheartening though, to see something you created get run into the ground.
  - corobo 5y ago
    Am I the only one that would love that situation to be able to start a new thing on easy mode? You know a lot of the failures, you now have a massive network, you have a big wad of cash. Bust out the idea bin and make something else!
    - andi999 5y ago
      Having a lot of cash is not a good position to start a new product (your pivots will most likely be delayed due to that)
      - corobo 5y ago
        Ok fair enough I'd also definitely have to pass on dealing with that to an accountant but I more mean being able to work on it full time with no financial concern than chucking a milly after each idea Also to clarify on the seeming heartless I sort of see things as being diluted when others work on them -- in a good way! -- for each person that adds to your thing it goes from mine to our. Long enough and big enough and it's more other people's creativity than yours. Your baby is all grown up and ready to do it's own thing
wolverine876 5y ago
> The market has the last word. I think that's a bias of hindsight, something people say after seeing it happen in a particular situation. In other situations, principles, promises, and other factors have the last word.

emodendroket 5y ago

Well, for every MailChimp there are several whose equity is worthless. If the company is not public I barely consider equity at all.

Vadoff 5y ago
You might as well ignore private companies altogether then, as the total compensation will be much less than public ones without equity factored in.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  Well I now work at a big company everybody has heard of so I guess you’re right.

bpodgursky 5y ago

$12 billion is a staggering amount of money. I can't imagine blaming someone for shifting their stance on an exit after imagining what they could fund with a $12 billion payout. If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely.

arthurcolle 5y ago
> If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely. it's an email service provider for campaigns and other email spam with a recognizable brand, let's not imagine that this is beneficial beyond helping companies market stuff to people. It's like a meta-business enhancement service. Happy for the founders, hope they do some good with the new payout - but I think you are giving them a bit too much credit. Sure, kick back 100M to your old school district, maybe another 250M to BLM or to Math for America to strike off all of your philanthropic efforts in one go, curate some plebeian sympathies and smile for the cameras but at the end of the day, making it easy to bombard people with endless email campaigns isn't exactly solving global problems EDIT: I reject hero worship vigorously - Mailchimp did a thing, it made money, and another entity that did a thing and made money that makes MORE money decided to absorb it and the cash payout was so good that investors/founders of MC decided to say fuck it, I'm done. Take my chips, gimme the loot. 12 billion dollars is generational wealth, but I mean I just can't/won't/don't respect people that have enabled spam or a business model that encourages bombarding people with BS. Same thing with IAP - I don't respect people who work for Apple because there was a layered hierarchy of priorities that said "we want to generate revenue at the expense of the people that trust us with their consumer electronics" I just intrinsically cannot respect people that decide to profit off of wasting people's time, the only commodity you can't generate more of. Instead of craftsmanship we have psychopathic operators that try to fine tune all the ways to extract money from others and even develop meta-endeavors where people pay others to execute activities to get end-user observers ('users' in modern web dev parlance, for the JS devs) to waste time/spend money, for net negative expected value to themselves and others. It's super sordid and I just can't endorse it. Whatever. In 25 years these guys will probably pull a Paul Allen and then start funding brain research or something after realizing that all the money in the world can't buy time and more life.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

> could be interpreted poorly now Yes doing the exact opposite of what you have always said tends to do that.

akudha 5y ago

People in positions of authority need to be careful with their words. They might not be intentionally misleading, but it is possible that they make a remark without thinking it through and others end up believing. It happened to me. The CTO of the company I worked for moved to another company and recruited a bunch of us from his previous job. He made tall promises, none of which worked out. We were annoyed at the time, but I now realize he didn't intentionally mislead us - he was just overly optimistic about his abilities and his own faith in the new company he joined. It was a disaster for everyone he recruited from his previous job. Everybody has a price, everyone has a breaking point.

statictype 5y ago

This is a very reasonable and nuanced take. Thanks for sharing.

brightball 5y ago

About 10 years ago I remember visiting a dev company that shared a building with MailChimp (I think it was called High Groove). I just remember them talking about how MC was rolling in money and essentially looking for things to spend on. Said they’d brought in consultants and spent a fortune redesigning their whole office space, etc. I have no idea what compensation over there looked like, but I can’t imagine that it was anything less than stellar. I’ve always been of the impression that equity is what you hand out when you can’t afford to compensate people enough otherwise. If they are paying well, not handing out equity seems like a perfectly normal move.

tinyhouse 5y ago

The fact they didn't give equity to employees is totally OK. It's their company, they don't have to share it with nobody. It can still be a great place to work with great benefits. I worked for a place like that early in my career. But when you sell for $12B and didn't take investment so all goes directly to you, how can you not allocate at least a million for each employee and change their life? With 1200 employees that's only $1.2B. They can easily give everyone even $2M and have zero impact of their life. What two people can do with $12B which they cannot do with $9B? (Yes I know, the final amount is much less after taxes, fees, etc) Obv they don't need to allocate money equally, it makes more sense to do it based on tenure.

itsdrewmiller 5y ago
sounds like they allocated 500 million between RSUs and cash bonuses, which is about 400k per employee.
- tinyhouse 5y ago
  That's great! I still think it's too low.
- billyhoffman 5y ago
  RSUs are *never* distributed equally. That’s not their point because they are entirely separate from the purchase of the acquired companies equity. The point of RSUs is to retain talent that is deemed critical to making the acquisition successful. Your VP of finance isn’t getting any RSUs. The acquiring company probably doesn’t need her, and she possesses no critical knowledge that any other senior financial person doesn’t also possess. Individual developers often get higher RSUs than managers. Why? More experience with the code and domain knowledge, especially if the engineering manager wasn’t an IC who grew into the role.
the_jeremy 5y ago
You're right. Jeff Bezos could give >$100k to every Amazon employee and only be giving away the money he's gained during the pandemic[0]. How can he not allocate at least 100k for each employee and change a lot of lives? He could easily give everyone this and have zero impact on this life. What can he do with $200B that he could not do with $100B? I could easily give away $10k to charity and save multiple lives[1] without impacting my quality of life, and given that you are on HN, you likely have $10k you could live without as well. We are literally choosing to have money in some retirement account over saving lives - why would you expect founders to give away money just to make rich tech workers more rich? [0]: https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-save-a-life-for-333706-and-thats-a-steal-2015-7 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-...

jollybean 5y ago

" This ultimately factored into my decision to leave, as it never appeared I would have a personal stake in the company." You had a 'stake' it was just in terms of other kinds of benefits. If you join a company after it's well-established, then for the most part, unless it's an 'extremely high growth company' - your stock package isn't going to be worth that much, it's just part of comp. If you joined MC several years after founding, even if they did give you equity, it would be a bit of a nice bonus, and that is all.

mandeepj 5y ago

> When deciding to join my recent company, equity was the largest factor in my move. Great, it worked out for you. A friend of mine, recently got an offer from a pre-IPO company. He asked for equity, but they are refusing to share any numbers - saying - their lawyers asked them to not do that. Is it normal?

bradstewart 5y ago
No. Under no circumstances should you accept an offer when a company refuses to give you any sort of context for what your grant might be worth.
jacobr1 5y ago
Frustratingly so. Getting an offer of a number of shares, without any context on the total number outstanding or recent valuations, doesn't provide you with the ability to calculate future upsides. Though even if you get those numbers, it is much rarer for things like preferred shares and any liquidity multiple they might have, which can screw over the common holders even is successful exits.
- silexia 5y ago
  As the owner of a company, I can tell you that any company that will not give you all the financial information necessary to value your shares and know what it's worth is scamming you.
- x0x0 5y ago
  They have to tell you at least the 409a or a similar valuation -- it's the strike on the grant.
wavefunction 5y ago
I can't speak to whether it's normal but it's a red flag for me. One of the companies I've worked for was pre-IPO and went IPO while I was there and when they hired me two years before that IPO they laid out the vesting schedule (1 year cliff, then monthly vesting of the remaining 3/4s of options) along with the strike price of the options along with how that strike price/valuation was calculated. Other places have had varying levels of professionalism like that but that was the only place that ended up IPOing and I believe there is a correlation between the professionalism of laying out clear compensation and the actual performance of the rest of the company.