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Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday
- karaterobot 4y agoYes, because he got stock as part of his compensation package. Last year it was worth more, but it's still worth a lot. If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all.
- capableweb 4y ago> If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all. The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (accordingly shareholders and the financial market), the product is indeed not very successful because if it was, the price would go up, not down. So he did a poor job, and now when sold his part of it, he got $105M.
- dcow 4y agoThe entire market is down. Sounds like every product person everywhere is doing a bad job, then.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> So he did a poor job Or (at least partially) the surrounding market conditions have changed into unfavorable conditions for a company like Coinbase Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Plus the FTX thing most likely isn't a product officer's fault
- capableweb 4y agoOk, bypassing anything regarding the macro-economic situation, how has the Coinbase product (successfully) changed since he was introduced in the company? As far as I know, the only change visible to users is the NFT thing, and we all know how that went.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoA more interesting question I have is "why was this chief product officer granted stock worth $100m"? Somebody (one person? multiple people? a large collective group) thought they did a good enough job to grant them whatever they negotiated.
- wpietri 4y ago> Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto? Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value. People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them. It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
- robocat 4y agoChart comparing COIN versus BTC-USD: https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-CCE10153.jpg https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-... (screen capture of yahoo finance). Yes, you can see Coinbase price appears to be highly correlated with Bitcoin price. However it is clear that Coinbase has still done very poorly: BTC is down 63% and COIN is down 84% since the IPO.
- MuffinFlavored 4y agoDevil's advocate: why was this chief product officer granted $100m in stock then?
- robocat 4y agoMost comments here are completely missing the point, because they are looking at whether he deserves the money. One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays it better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also blind to the fact that they get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages. Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth. It is just as unfair that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. 33M$ per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional. We can question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society, but there is not much to be gained by saying “not fair” when somebody plays the game extremely well. He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020. A capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all a good wee capitalist really cares about. I would guess him doing his actual job would make zero difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating: the financial incentives they gave him were more “pump-and-dump” rather than work hard to build product. Pump-and-dump may have been aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly good IPO (depending on details of non-trading periods etcetera). [1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatterjee https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatte... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=table https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
- yreg 4y ago> Implying that the IPO valuation was reasonable.
- jahewson 4y agoStock price is not a measure of product success.
- kokojumbo 4y agoSo, the ship is sinking?
- darth_avocado 4y agoProbably the other way round. They’re getting rid of a product officer who has no faith in his product.
- newbie578 4y agoThis is surreal to read. Can anyone please explain how is it possible for the board to value so much someone? I don't see what can possibly justify this kind of compensation...
- sebzim4500 4y agoHis equity was presumably worth much less when it was given to him.
- calciphus 4y agoHe joined around a year ago, it is now worth 72% less than when he joined. Possibly part of the reason to depart? A $70M comp cut and little hope of it recovering seems a good reason
- swyx 4y agonot so much the board as Brian Armstrong himself. he seems to have a history of very dubious C-suite hires, including acquihiring Balaji's Earn.com for $100m and constantly talking up his impact when it turned out to be.. a shitty e-learning platform (https://www.coinbase.com/learning-rewards https://www.coinbase.com/learning-rewards) (i know i sound negative about all this but if i'm mistaken about Earn please correct me)
- mikeyouse 4y agoBalaji pulled off a heck of a heist himself. Partner at A16Z, spin out some bizarre crypto oil-cooled mining company, pivot like 4-5 times, and then have Coinbase, the company with your VC partners on the board "acquire" your failed startup for 10 figures after it's already burned through over $100M of investor money. These dudes just begging the SEC to get involved in VC deals.
- Apocryphon 4y agoHow many of this industry’s thought leaders are similarly scummy?
- bhahn 4y agoThe title of the article is a bit misleading. It implies that he's leaving with a severance package -- that he was let go by the company -- but the $105M is from selling stock from his original employment package and it seems like he's leaving on his own volition.
- aqme28 4y agoIt's not that misleading. This isn't an early employee who held onto his shares. He joined less than two years ago. He got an insanely high compensation package.
- __derek__ 4y agoOn the bright side, Coinbase launched a lot of high-value new products during the last two years that will help the company thrive and grow in the coming years.
- jnwatson 4y agoIndistinguishable from parody... What would be an example of a new product that will help the company thrive?
- extr 4y agoIt's indistinguishable because he is in fact making a joke.
- __derek__ 4y agoThat's a bingo.
- captn3m0 4y agoCoinswitch, a crypto-exchange in India is now pivoting to wealth management: > We have seven new non-crypto products in our 2023 roster, which includes fixed deposits, ETFs [exchange-traded funds], mutual funds, stocks, bonds and U.S. equities. > The goal is to be the one-stop wealth-tech destination for every Indian. As we diversify into other asset classes, there are different business models we are experimenting with to check which is the best for customers. There are multiple partnerships in place since we are launching such large-scale assets onto our platform. [Editor’s note: CoinSwitch declined to give the names of partners or detail on licenses obtained to sell non-crypto products.] > We started off with a mission to make money equal for all. Crypto was the starting point for us but we will continue to innovate towards being a wealth tech platform. We see crypto as an investment class that is offered alongside other assets, to help users build a diversified portfolio. Ref: https://forkast.news/indias-coinswitch-exchange-looks-to-non-crypto/ https://forkast.news/indias-coinswitch-exchange-looks-to-non...
- leesec 4y agoOne of the biggest compensation packages I've ever heard of (600M+ in 5 years) and he walked away a year in. Wow.
- boeingUH60 4y agoI doubt he voluntarily walked away…the only product he launched, the Coinbase NFT marketplace, flopped and the general crypto slump has also affected the company.
- capableweb 4y ago> “As our product leaders have taken on more responsibility, I've been able to consider taking a much-needed personal break to spend more time with my family. It has been a tough year for me personally — my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and my mother passed away unexpectedly. If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I've allowed myself time to grieve either yet,” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-my-crypto-web3-journey-time-little-break-chatterjee https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-my-crypto-web3-jou... Maybe these people absolutely no heart at all but I'd be a tiny bit surprised if he actually mentioned his mothers death and father getting Alzheimer's as the reason for leaving when in reality he was fired.
- jacobsenscott 4y agoWhat a POS - we had to continue to work while caring for a family member with Alzheimer's, their death, and the death of another family member. I'm sure many of his reports had to continue to work though similar situations.
- leesec 4y agoNot sure why the outburst man. His mom died, it's a valid reason to not want to work for a bit, and why would you if you had 105 million
- seeingfurther 4y agoThis seems like an awfully high compensation package for someone who only joined around the time of the IPO.
- DGCA 4y agoI can’t think of anything CB put out during his tenure that was interesting at all. IIRC, he was a driving the push for Coinbase NFT which flopped massively.
- cableshaft 4y agoNot sure the exact timeline for these, but what about staking and yields, integration of Coinbase Pro with the main site, and a more robust Tax Center? Those all seemed pretty useful to me. Pretty sure all those were within the last couple of years.
- renewiltord 4y agoYeah, at a 11 b market cap, he got 1% for joining? That's amazing.
- phillipcarter 4y agoAll I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.
- dcow 4y agoBy "so little value" are you saying that whatshisface was/is a bad product leader or are you saying that it's impossible for anything to be valuable when it's crypto-adjacent?
- jxramos 4y agoWhat makes you say the value of their contribution is minor? Is there some public basis for that sort of claim to be found elsewhere?
- flashgordon 4y agoUmm have your seen what their financial performance? At least somewhat fair that you know Coinbase's product has some impact on stock price!
- qeternity 4y agoCoinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. Coinbase has an $11.6b market cap which means he extracted a little under 1% of the entire company’s value in two years.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago> Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. This has nothing to do with "product", though. Memestocks are down ~80%. Crypto prices down ~70%. Volumes are down even more in many segments... >97% for NFTs. Just because Coinbase was at one time valued almost 10x what it is now, doesn't mean that was the correct value - and "product" ruined it.
- pictur 4y agoWhat exactly is this site solving? I'm asking because I don't know
- pictur 4y agoAnother site that makes millions from shitcoin bullshit as I understand it
- dwighttk 4y agoIt lets one buy Bitcoin (etc) with US Dollars.
- emaginniss 4y agoFools weren't being separated from their money quickly enough
- pavlov 4y agoSells unlicensed securities to people with a gambling-addict mindset.
- recuter 4y agoApropos of nothing I am reminded of one of Woody Allens earlier, funnier movies. It was called Take the Money and Run.
- KKKKkkkk1 4y agoI wish I could attach a graph of the COIN stock price starting from the IPO. It's a nice and steady downward trend all the way to -85%.
- tdullien 4y agoAs someone who has lost his mother unexpectedly last year, and my father suffered from a brain hemorrhage leading to dementia ... and I can very much empathize with the instinct to stop working and take a long break.
- spoonjim 4y agoI hope you don’t believe him. He’s leaving because he has $105m and his options are underwater. See ya, suckers!
- idkyall 4y agoThe article listed his options price at $18.71, so even with a slump in the share price they're still valuable, albeit a large multiple less
- breck 4y agoSorry for your losses. I hope you are doing okay and are taking a long break if that's what you desire...but not too long. The world benefits from your software and insights.
- sanp 4y agoArticle says "...Ford's revenues are five times the size of Coinbase's...". Isn't it more like 69x (Q3: Ford $39.4B and Coinbase: $576M).
- itg 4y agoI bet the 950 people let go a few weeks ago and the 1,100 let go back in June must love hearing this news.
- edgyquant 4y agoA needed dip in the bubble and all of the sudden HN goes from market capitalist to left leaning. This person sold their stock, the time for employees to complain was when he was given this equity a couple of years ago.
- Apocryphon 4y agoYes, people generally flip views once material conditions change. Also, when the tide goes out, everyone who was swimming naked is revealed. As it turns out, ZIRP was allowing many companies to swim naked.
- wpietri 4y agoNope. They can also complain now. And forevermore if they want. None of us, you included, is obligated to protect grifters from the criticism of people who suffer while they walk away laughing.
- edgyquant 4y agoThey can complain now but it reeks of jealously instead of actual anger at the “grift.” When conditions were different nobody cares this dude got a ton of equity because they got equity as well.
- wpietri 4y agoIt might be jealousy. But it also could be that they're just now realizing how they got taken, and to what extent. Which would be unsurprising, as plenty of startups puff up expectations and take advantage of the young and naive. I have relatively little sympathy for Coinbase employees, as I think the whole thing was a scam built on scams, so it was always a question of who gets screwed. But I have some sympathy for the ones who were early enough in their careers that they didn't really have the chance to learn how rotten the world can get in spots.
- jmount 4y agoAnd the money has to come from somewhere, unless they are paid in NFT/e-coin.
- swyx 4y agoHeadlines from last week: > It was announced on Jan. 10, 2022 that Coinbase would be slashing its workforce by about 20% (which translates to 950 employees) in an effort to reduce overall operating expenses by 25%. > This is the second round of layoffs for the crypto exchange, as they laid off 18% of the workforce last June as the crypto winter sets in and the space attempts to recover from the disastrous year. why exactly is this guy getting $105m again?
- yreg 4y agoBecause he got it as a compensation when they hired him? Now he is just selling his stake after he left.
- ergocoder 4y agoHN is advocating for crawling back previously agreed compensation if an employee doesn't do their jobs well. Oh boy. Software engineers would be in shambles.
- esotericimpl 4y ago[dead]
- gerash 4y agoIt's amazing how much some can milk a company
- insane_dreamer 4y agoDamn, it feels good to be a ~~gangster~~crypto CPO
- par 4y agoI wonder if Congress plans to do anything about executive compensation yet.
- jacobsenscott 4y agoI don't know. Do you think a congressperson is more likely to listen to you, or someone with 100 million dollars?
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoYeah, I hate it when people exchange money for goods and services in a non-coercive, mutually agreed transaction. There oughta be a law!
- globalreset 4y agoThese executive salaries ara usually shareholder's money (like the whole business), and the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it.
- NotYourLawyer 4y agoNot these days. Blackrock et al. hold big enough stakes in the big companies that they'll be listened to if they complain. Regardless though, why would the government be better at protecting shareholder interests than... the shareholders?
- lordfrito 4y ago> the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it Any examples to cite? Because I can't think of an example of a single company where this is true. Usually it's a small group of shareholders that hold more than 50% of the company, making it essentially theirs as they hold a winning number of votes. They run it in a way that benefits them, placing their people on the Board of Directors, setting their goals, which the C's just follow. Sure the C's get paid well, but that's negotiated with the Board (who represents the majority shareholders). I'll concede that sometimes, when the majority shareholder is also in the C-suite, you see more blatant "take from the company and give to myself" behavior. But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company. Poorly run companies usually have a poor Board of Directors. This usually happens when the majority shareholders are short sighted and prioritize short term profit over long term growth. I've seen situations where the company/board claws back money after a C leaves, because the C was negligent/dishonest in their doings. In all of the above cases, the shareholders are the one's holding the cards. I can't think of a single case where the board conspired with the C's to fleece the shareholders. To do so would likely result in criminal charges.
- LisaDziuba 4y ago[dead]
- dotcoma 4y ago>Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday in US dollars and not in crypto-baloney, let us add.
- atomicnumber3 4y agoThat's an insult to baloney - at least baloney has the intrinsic value wherein it can be metabolized into calories.
- asdff 4y agoIt's especially insulting not to spell it correctly. Bologna.
- dotcoma 4y agoMeaning number (2) https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baloney https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baloney I happen to be from Italy, btw. And hate bologna. (The sausage, or whatever it is, not the city)
- lost_tourist 4y agolike it or not baloney is a word. Informal, but you'll still find it in dictionaries.
- asdff 4y agoSounds like a whole lot of bologna to me
- jwilber 4y agoThe inequality in our country is astounding.
- solomatov 4y agoAs far as I see it, that was his employment contract. Good for him. Companies can't retroactively change employment contracts in case of contingencies, and that's very good for all of us. (I am not a lawyer).
- mathverse 4y agoFull time employment is rigged. For everyone. Tech workers are just now waking up to the reality that they are the same disposable peasants like all the rest. Seeing this kind of compensation and thinking .. oh well that guy must have done hell of a job must be some kind of delusion.
- nervousvarun 4y agoAgreed but...is this just a problem with the US? Does this kindof thing happen in any other country? And if the answer is "yes, but not just to this degree"...what about relatively speaking? If country X has GDP of Y...is the ratio of executive fleecing that happens in America comparable to any other country?
- nlitened 4y agoEverybody is free to start their own businesses or to get hired as a CPO at a booming startup. I see a lot of people complaining, but not that many actually using those very simple rigged opportunities to make 100M fast.
- ryandrake 4y agoThere are vanishingly small number of these positions in the world, and a vanishingly small percentage of that vanishingly small number are hiring. These positions are also gated by things that commoners do not have access to, like prestigious educational backgrounds and well-connected networks of executives. Same for becoming a founder. Unless you bootstrap, the minute you want to raise funding, you're more often than not going to be blocked by those same gates. This is a class issue, not a "seize the opportunity" issue.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI understand starting a business, but pulling off the kind of career moves the executive in question pulled off requires a level of grift that most honest people can't really fathom.
- asdff 4y agoWhy don't you have 100m? Or do you already have 100m?
- cm2187 4y agoThe biggest news in this article is that coinbase is still worth over $10bn. The crypto scam looks dead but it's still moving.
- kredd 4y agoNKLA market cap still hovers around $1.3B. So yeah, anything is possible.
- courgette 4y agoI would like it to stay afloat till the summer, then vacation, then finding a real job. Edit : it’s not fair, we do work. Like a real job, but it feels … ethereal
- mindw0rk 4y agoLooking at your comments it feels like your employer could identify you. A friendly reminder to be aware of that.
- carrja99 4y agoNice. Very nice.
- maest 4y agoNow let's see Paul Allen's comp package.
- haney 4y agoI think it's time for me transition into a product role...
- idlewords 4y agoJoke's on him; dude got paid in fiat!
- gymbeaux 4y agoNot too long ago I was playing the stock market with some spare cash and a trend I noticed was that these companies that lost more money than they were able to generate, all had well-paid executives. So you have a company that reports say a $100M loss one quarter, well it would turn out a sizable chunk of that was executive compensation. I’m not sure how I feel about execs making really any money before they’ve made the company they’re running, profitable.
- chadlavi 4y agoI for one am very sure about how I feel about that
- jahewson 4y agoAs we’ve just seen the easiest way to achieve profitability is layoffs. Probably not what you had in mind.
- gymbeaux 4y agoI propose instituting a 4-day workweek and cutting everyone’s pay by 10-20%. Some will no doubt resign (saving the company money), but the rest will instantly save the company 10-20% in labor costs. If all those studies out there are to be believed, productivity would remain the same or increase (although in those studies pay wasn’t cut along with hours, so… maybe not). Anyway now seems like a great opportunity for companies to experiment with 4-day workweeks, whether 40 hours (better than nothing) or 32 hours.
- hackitup7 4y agoIt seems completely crazy that they'd need to pay him $600m of equity at signing. Like why not close him with a package of (say) $200m? Even if he was making $5m annual TC at Google, that would still be 10x his comp in equity alone.
- vernon99 4y agoThis of course is not what happened. The article explains. He was granted stock at a much (much) cheaper price.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoHis quartz kitchen is going to have epic waterfalls.
- schemescape 4y agoIf the majority of this is from selling his stock, and the stock is down 85% since the IPO, how much would he have had if the stock hadn’t tanked? Edit: I missed it the first time, but the article actually answers this: $646 million.
- lifeinthevoid 4y agoThe 105 Mio. figure includes stock sales when the price was still high.
- thepasswordis 4y agoHN is so weird when it comes to anything related to crypto. Guys if you hate “capital”, then maybe stop hanging out on a news website run by and started by a venture capitalists and populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves. This guy took a compensation package that both he and the company agreed to. He then sold the compensation package. There’s no scandal here. Good for him.
- masterof0 4y ago> populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves Citation needed.
- matthewaveryusa 4y agoI'm always intrigued at people's carriers and where exactly the inflection point was. Looking at Surojit's career, it went something like this: BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy, Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ? MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year? Head of Payment products India at Google, 8 years rising though the ranks 300-500k/year?, did an externship of 2 years at flipkart as SVP Then back to google as a VP 500-1.5MM/year? CPO at coinbase made 150 million. It looks like he moved around, leveraging his title to get senior roles between start-up and well-established companies: PM at small company to PM at big company, Head of product at big company to SVP at startup SVP at startup to VP at big company VP of big company to C-suite at startup pre-IPO Most of all, he got in on the crypto gravy train right in time for his options to balloon
- benjaminwootton 4y agoJumping between big companies and small companies isn't a bad career strategy. Small companies like the brand names, but you can take big steps up in title in the small companies and startups. I did it myself, though it was accident of history rather than being planned.
- theGnuMe 4y agoYour salary estimates are high in my opinion. He would have been H1B after his Masters. >Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year 65-100k maybe less. >PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year? 150k max. Oracle, IBM and Symantec do not pay as well as FAANG and you need to adjust for the time. They also colluded to suppress wages. But he did navigate the valley. Seems like a cool guy to get to know and I'd read his autobiography.
- hnarayanan 4y agoThis is the right question to ask
- brentm 4y agoGood question. My gut says his all in comp for Google including stock would likely be a lot higher but who knows.
- Imnimo 4y agoAt least he didn't talk about politics at work. Can't put a price tag on that!
- TrackerFF 4y agoI checked the list they refered to: https://www.equilar.com/reports/95-table-equilar-new-york-times-top-200-highest-paid-ceos-2022 https://www.equilar.com/reports/95-table-equilar-new-york-ti... And damn, top guy got paid almost a billion. Also, the top two guys are Brigham Young alumni.
- alphabetting 4y agoAll the FAANG CEOs are represented besides Sundar Pichai. I looked it up and his compensation was $2M ($6M with stock). Wild that the Amazon CEO got paid over $200M more than him.
- jatins 4y ago$6M seems rather small for Google's CEO compensation. Did Sundar take a huge paycut?
- spaceman_2020 4y agoman, I should have done that MBA... Edit: To be fair, the top guy is also the company's founder. Props to him.
- schemescape 4y agoWow, someone at Qualtrics got paid half a billion to oversee a 50% drop in their stock price?
- chadlavi 4y agothe last person to make millions on crypto.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- Quarrelsome 4y agoFor a sense of scale; a somewhat representative figure for a lifetime median income of a worker in the US is ~2.5m [1][2] this guy is earning ~50 times that in a couple of years. To give these figures a bit of shape. This is like getting a smarties cake[3] and giving Surojit Chatterjee pretty much the entire cake for just a couple years work. Whereas the median worker gets, for working a lifetime of effort (~45 years) about a quarter of a single smartie. I'm not saying that everyone should earn the same but rather I would question this gap which continues to grow. This sort of payout is not aspirational IMHO but rather a symbol of a deeply dysfunctional society. [1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/lifetime-earnings-in-the-united-states-over-six-decades/ https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/lifetime-e... [2] I made some crass assumptions on top of these figures to make it easier for me to calculate, but its representative. [3] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e8/fb/72e8fbf7cf48f45db6d8f518121d7c80.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e8/fb/72e8fbf7cf48f45db6d8...
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoIt’s a fallacy that there is a fixed amount of money to go around. Less money for this Coinbase guy doesn’t mean more money for the median worker. If anything, probably the opposite.
- Cerium 4y agoWe need maximum wage laws. Such a law might look like this: The maximum total compensation (Salary + estimated stock grant value) must be less than some multiple of the lowest prorated total compensation of any regularly scheduled employee or contractor operating within nominal geographic limits. Goal: Stop overpaying top staff or increase the pay of your lowest workers, including commonly outsourced positions such as janitorial staff.
- anonymouskimmer 4y agoThe big issue is stock. It's also one that would be really, really hard to fix because of entrenched interests and wish fulfillment. To fix it you'd have to do something like break it up into component parts: 1) Voting rights 2) Capital ownership (liquidation rights) 3) Dividend rights (aka profit sharing, pensions plans, and the like) As well as expand the use of bonds for fundraising (including at the startup funding steps). It will never happen due to entrenched interests (one of which is very importantly the right of legislators to own shares in companies). I don't know. It could happen in privately owned corporations, employee owned corporations, or if shareholders of a particular company get mad about the huge payouts to fly-by-night executives. But it's unlikely.
- rdevsrex 4y agoAnd how much is the average employee making? Honestly I'm down for making a law that says in order to pay execs more, they have to pay their workers more. Even at a 50 to 1 ratio of worker to exec, they can still make more money but increase the wealth of the workers at the same time.
- dzonga 4y agothis is what we call stealing a living. to ya tech minions - slaving every day because some higher up said jira tickets gotta be complete. dude made more money in two years than you would have made working 10 years at coinbase as an IC. --also edit Stock options are a bad way to pay people. Perverse incentives - the holder of stock options doesn't take risk in the way a normal way a stockholder does. a stock option holder isn't there for the long term. if I had a company - you won't get stock options. you will get decent pay. and loan to buy company stock at public prices
- throwaway5959 4y agoBut yeah, it’s software engineers that are paid too much. I wonder why billionaires never fight for lower pay for C-level staff.
- htrp 4y ago10b5-1 sales is also the default model for execs who have MNPI. From the article > According to the SEC, chief operating officer Emilie Choi booked $106 million in stock sales that same year. So it's less that they overpaid him and more that all of the exec team other than Armstrong didn't believe in crypto and sold their a chunk options pretty much as they vested