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All 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 deliver
by phillipcarter 4y ago
All 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.
- newswasboring 4y agoYeah, but isn't it the chief product officers job to figure out how to isolate their company from this?
- justinbaker84 4y agoYes but if you look at the balance sheet they have about 6 billion in net assets (assets minus liabilities) so the value of the company itself is really more like 5.6 billion. This is a little tricky because company valuation in many cases is a combination of the value of owned assets and the expected value of the actual operations of the company. So he really extracted more like 2% of the value of the operations of company itself.
- phillipcarter 4y agohttps://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1522046933258293248 https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1522046933258293248 This is his legacy
- jxramos 4y agoexcellent context, thank you
- dahdum 4y ago> What makes you say the value of their contribution is minor? Excluding the stock performance entirely, they've released no particularly successful or even interesting products under his tenure. He comes from Google where he worked on ads and shopping, so honestly that tracks pretty well. Google (not Alphabet) hasn't done anything interesting or innovative in a long time now either.
- coding123 4y agoI can't tell if you're serious or not (the aspire towards part).
- kchoudhu 4y ago100% serious. If capital is planning on being this dumb, as labor I have no problem whatsoever relieving them of their monetary burdens.
- yamtaddle 4y agoI'm surprised anyone thinks this might not be intended seriously. It's a pretty common sentiment among the working class. Stole from the little people? You suck. Ripped off the owning class? Nice job, please do more of that.
- edgyquant 4y agoIt’s not even about stealing. With 100m I would have the resources to found multiple companies that could fix real problems and provide good paying jobs.
- bcrosby95 4y agoIt's simply turnabout. The owning class regularly, illegally, rips off the working class and gets away with it because it's so difficult to prove in courts.
- jobs_throwaway 4y agoThis isn't stealing though. The owning class agreed to this.
- soperj 4y agoI mean, who's ripping off? It's a legal contract.
- yamtaddle 4y agoWhy does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off? Tons of places commonly associated with ripping people off use contracts to do it. Car lots, telcos. Banks.
- MuffinFlavored 4y ago> and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist How do we evaluate/measure if that is true or not? https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-just-like-your-opinion-man https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-just-like-your-opinion-...
- SQueeeeeL 4y agoThe literal collapse of an institution is a pretty A+ indicator of failure of leadership
- protonbob 4y agoDang is Coinbase collapsing?
- rco8786 4y agoCollapsing is a strong word, but their very tightly tied to whatever the crypto market is doing..which is not good at the moment.
- swyx 4y agoeh. BTC is up 40% year to date. FTX may have been the bottom of this cycle.
- rank0 4y agoYTD is like 25 days… what’s the TTM?
- swyx 4y agoparent comment said "not good at the moment" so just responding to "at the moment" its actually not as bad as the haters would imagine (e.g. its well above the 2020-era ceiling of $16k despite much tighter monetary policy and crypto institutions failing all over the place)
- jacobsenscott 4y agoThis is certainly the way it should be done in the crypto world.
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agoThe good old a16z heist. Rugpull on investors after.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoI've defended crypto in the past but its increasingly clear that this is all basically academic BS, but with a financial component. Theoretically, its nice to have a "digital gold" alternative to store your wealth away from authoritarian governments. But most of crypto thrives in countries with strong democratic traditions and no history of extended and widespread government overreach. All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them. They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on. I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.
- zitterbewegung 4y agoThese comments don’t really address opportunity costs. It’s the same concept where why are we paying non profit CEOs so much but when you think about it those CEOs could have just worked for a much higher salary anywhere else . The cheap money era is gone now though.
- samstave 4y ago>>why are we paying non profit CEOs And anyone with a "foundation" (recall sarah palin's daughter getting paid some ridiculous amount for her :foundation" to fight teen-pregnancy after been a pregnant teen??
- newswasboring 4y agoFwiw I would trust a person who has gone through teen pregnancy to understand what kind problems it has. Just like people who didn't get to go to good schools establish scholarships. In isolation, those are the people who will understand the issue much more.
- samstave 4y agoTrue, but her "foundation" was taking 'donations' and paying her ~$450,000 a year as ceo... And then evaporated I believe and dont think she had any impact on the problem.
- newswasboring 4y agoYeah. I didn't know that detailed, but I indeed suspected it. That's why I said "in isolation". These people will be scammers regardless of what they are doing. I was just being a bit pedantic because your wording suggested teen mom's should not run charities for teenage pregnancy related things.
- masterof0 4y agoThat's a fallacy, those CEO's wouldn't be elsewhere making more, otherwise they would. That's just a trick they use to convince people of supporting with (in most cases tax free donations) their ridiculous life style. Another reason I prefer donating directly to people who need it, or volunteering. A person who is making 3M/year in an organization, is not the "sacrifice myself for the people" type, let's stop fouling ourselves.
- spamizbad 4y agoYou may not agree with it but you gotta respect the hustle.
- newswasboring 4y agoWhy? Why do you have to respect this hustle?
- spamizbad 4y agoCrypto companies were starving for talent, eager to pull people in from the "Web 2.0" world with lavish salaries. He recognized their desperation and negotiated a gigantic executive comp package. Also accurately sized-up Brian Armstrong as a lightweight who will eagerly sign-on anyone who strokes his ego. His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-tier quiet-quitting. He's not the only one whose done this: Balaji Srinivasan got hired on and did something similar with Coinbase's learning platform. Massive comp packages for executives doing C- work and still collecting atta-boys from the CEO. That guy used shareholder money to shitpost on twitter and build his personal brand.
- newswasboring 4y agoThis is like the opposite of hustle. Don't you think you are supporting getting massive compensation for essentially being bad at your job? Do you think it's ok because it happens to a large corporation? I can understand feeling happy at the big corporation's misery but respect isn't what is owed to this dude. Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it's still over a million dollars scammed from just the normal people.
- spamizbad 4y ago"hustle" in this case is meant in the informal, pejorative way (a swindle)
- wpietri 4y agoFair point. I am generally opposed to crime, legal and otherwise. But stealing from the grifters not only has a certain moral justice to it, it might even be a net social positive.
- JackFr 4y agoHe's like Omar.
- mayormcmatt 4y agoFarmer and the Dell intensifies
- wpietri 4y agoThat did cross my mind! But what makes Omar different is that he understood his place in the world and was honest about it. Both with himself and with the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3i36ybA8Ms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3i36ybA8Ms
- jrochkind1 4y agoOmar is a fictional character, but I would like to believe if he had managed to acquire far far more than he needed for a basically comfortable lifestyle, he would have shared a lot of it.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoBuddy, have you ever heard of this thing called "cryptocurrency"?
- samstave 4y agodont forget how much google is still paying android founder's golden parachute after the many sexual accusations against him... I think he beats this.
- Psyonic 4y agoyes, but "android founder." What great product innovation did this guy pioneer at CB? Any justification at all for a $100M payday?
- spaceman_2020 4y agoHe built their $400/day volume NFT marketplace
- samstave 4y agoFair, but the issue was being paid $90,000,000 a year to leave the company because too many women accused him of sexual assault....
- arcturus17 4y agoHe's walking with around a sixth of all money raised by the company [1] Might as well treat the execs and all VCs involved to a luxurious "fuck you" dinner! [1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase/company_financials https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase/company_fin...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- htrp 4y agoall stock sales though.... so techncially your money (if you hold coinbase stock retail)
- btown 4y agoYep, the better comparison would be a % of Coinbase's market cap which is $11B. Still, as far as I know, walking away with 1% of your company's market cap is rare for a non-founder hired only 2 years prior.
- arcturus17 4y agoYea don't hold me for the rigor of my statement, it was just a comparison of magnitude. You're right that they've already passed the bag to investors, possibly a lot of that to retail - they can all still have a nice "fuck you" dinner in their honor!
- davidw 4y agoI have to say... there's something kind of demoralizing about this and some of the other shenanigans happening right now. I'm part of a local YIMBY group advocating for more housing and you see some really rough stories about people who are employed, work hard, and still can't put a roof over their heads. And then you see stuff like this. /rant
- WeylandYutani 4y agoI feel you. All we can do is vote and treat people who are worse off as human beings. I'm fortunate to live in a country that has a social safety net.
- TomSwirly 4y agoAbsolutely not. That's morally awful. A society that rewards its very worst people with money and power is a society on the way down.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- apples_oranges 4y agoInvestors buying into crypto... "aaaaand it's gone." .. into the pockets of guys like him
- munk-a 4y agoThis philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrated. It's pervasive through American society that pulling the wool over the eyes of shadowy entities (large corporations, the government etc...) is a virtue but every time it's done it pulls a lot of money out of the hands of people that could use it more and further concentrates wealth. It's also part of the virtue package that allowed a recent presidential candidate to proudly proclaim that they'd not share their tax returns while talking about how much money they'd fleeced the government for and they were openly praised for these actions while running for the highest office. Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.
- sushzbdbehsh 4y ago[flagged]
- anamexis 4y agoFor what it's worth, I think GP was being sarcastic.
- logicallee 4y agoEDIT: apparently I was wrong and the poster was not sarcastic. (I thought it was Poe's law.)
- jxf 4y ago> Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.
- loeg 4y agoGP carefully said "package," not salary. Package includes stock compensation.
- jxf 4y agoWhat I mean to say is that compensation is typically negotiated as a _number of shares_, not as a dollar value. The fact that outside investors wanted to pay a surprisingly high amount for those shares is on them. If your company says "we're going to pay you $400,000 and a commemorative water bottle", it's hardly fleecing the company if someone else wants to pay $40M for the water bottle.
- tempsy 4y agoCoinbase seems to have from the very beginning overindexed on "resume" hires and not people who actually care about crypto eg Ivy League/Google/TradFi hires.
- newswasboring 4y agoThat the most unique take I've read on this. Any more details or are you just speaking from experience?
- tempsy 4y agoNot sure what you mean. Feel free to look at the background of all the big hires they've made. It's lots of Ivy League/Google/LinkedIn/Banking/Consulting people.
- newswasboring 4y agoYeah but how do you know those were not crypto enthu people? I've seen crypto enthusiasts in all walks of society. I thought there was more detail to what you were saying.
- jonahbenton 4y agoDoesn't sound like any trickery was involved. Relatively standard high profile options package. He got really, really, really lucky in terms of timing and mechanics.