5 ms·

Just skimming the 2022 990, executive compensation was $285,170. Total expenses $1,904,475 on $2,005,994 in revenue.

asah 2y ago
Unfortunately this is normal, because running a non-profit is hard enough that suitable candidates command high salaries. I was on an NPO board with a similar ratio and we couldn't get it down.
- bitcurious 2y ago
  That comp $ is very reasonable in the abstract, what's not reasonable is comp:revenue. You can't be paying 15% of your revenue to a single individual, because almost by definition they aren't performing well enough to justify that salary.
  - pbronez 2y ago
    Even when that person is the founder? Who created the thing and keeps it going through personal force of will? Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. You want high quality people to be able to focus full time on stuff like this.
    - Workaccount2 2y ago
      Especially when that person is the founder lol
    - jrockway 2y ago
      I mean, she would make 3x more than that just being a software engineering cog in the machine. To me, a salary of $200k for this position looks like donating $400k a year to it. Plus your time. That seems pretty generous to me.
      - kelipso 2y ago
        Here we go with inflated salary guesses that a small percentage of programmers get paid. Also I doubt she decided to start a non-profit because she was good at coding.
        johnnyanmac 2y ago
        a small percentage of programmers are C class executive. seems pretty apples to apples to me.
      - cudgy 2y ago
        I’m sure there are pizza delivery drivers that exist that make 100k+ per year. Therefore, all pizza delivery drivers making 36k per year are donating 64k+ to the pizza restaurants they work for. Really?
  - crazygringo 2y ago
    That's not necessarily true, because revenue can be a poor measure of capturing value and scale in organizations that are mostly volunteer. If that individual is managing the process of successfully getting 1,000 people who volunteer 15 hrs/wk, which you'd otherwise have to pay let's say $30/hr including taxes, then that would be the equivalent of $22.5 million in annual revenue. Suddenly $285K in executive compensation looks perfectly fine. In some mostly-volunteer organizations, you will find that most of the money pays the professionals at the top, because you can't get that necessary expertise any other way. I worked at one once right out of college, at the bottom of the full-time-paid rung, and I had interestingly conflicted moral feelings about it. I spent a lot of time with volunteers and yet I was being paid. But I needed a job, I needed to pay rent. And the tech skills I was providing literally none of the volunteers could do. It made me question whether it was "fair" that all these people's monetary donations were going to paying my salary. But then again, I wasn't the one who set rents to be as high as they were in the city where the organization put its headquarters, and student debt doesn't get forgiven just because you work for a nonprofit.
    - cmcaleer 2y ago
      Your job as the top executive isn’t to get labor, it is to run a company (which sometimes involves getting labor). In order to do that you must manage your expenses. If you overspend on your salary such that you put the company in a position where the company is begging for 4 months of your salary as runway, you have failed at your job and you demonstrably were irresponsible, reckless in your spending and unable to make tough choices to ensure survival. In other words, you were not worth $285k.
      - crazygringo 2y ago
        That's not necessarily true at all. Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no control over, demand patterns change, etc. There are plenty of failed orgs that would have failed even if they'd had true business geniuses leading them. You could just as easily assert that paying someone $285K got the expertise that kept the organization going for an extra 3 years than it would have otherwise, because someone with less expertise would have made a bunch of worse choices that it would have run out of money 3 years earlier. You seem to be demanding some kind of divine level of perfection here.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  300k isn’t crazy especially in SF that s not going up get you far
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    Perhaps we should stop concentrating so many opportunities in areas with exhausted resources that are needed to host an economic sector.
    - asah 2y ago
      Logic is backwards: most (not all!) high power candidates live in expensive dense cities to take advantage of easy access to other people, both for culture (e.g. art and live performances) and work (e.g. meetings, networking events, 1x1s, etc. Put another way, there aren't enough qualified candidates outside expensive cities and therefore the salaries typically tend to go up to cover those costs of living.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      Buyers are free to choose to buy from the company in Poducksville instead, but I suspect that, in the typical case, they'll never learn about said company because it takes strong network effects to get things off the ground.
      - lenerdenator 2y ago
        Every ecosystem - economic, ecological, or otherwise - has a carrying capacity. The SV/NorCal area is reaching that capacity. There are only so many dollars customers are willing to pay to get a quality product, service, or charitable act before the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and those dollars are what funds the compensation packages of both profits and non-profits. There is no infinite well of value (no matter what capitalism says), which means that there is a ceiling on things like salary and the things (namely residential real estate) that said salary can buy. If you pay a person $300k to do a job because that's what the local job market dictates in SV, are you really getting the surplus value to cover that salary? Can you keep charging customers that amount? Will you do increasingly alienating things that causes negative externalities (read: regulation) to be passed that impact your business model's ability to pay that much? You could very well be better off to hire someone at the $150k rate in a place like Kansas City or Minneapolis. Those aren't "Poducksville" but that's the competition the valley will begin to see.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
Question about the 2022 990 schedule b part 1. The contributors No./amount is restricted. What does this mean? Is it common?
uberman 2y ago
Just going to note that all of that was one person's salary. I question why a smaller non-profit based in Tennessee would need to pay their CEO almost 300k. Senior researchers where I work make half that while managing grant projects with twice the funding.
peanuty1 2y ago
Wow, that's a massive amount of money for just one individual. I'm disappointed to hear that.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  for a company in tech, is a 280k salary really that surprising? For a CEO it's on the lower side these days.

asah 2y ago

Unfortunately this is normal, because running a non-profit is hard enough that suitable candidates command high salaries. I was on an NPO board with a similar ratio and we couldn't get it down.

bitcurious 2y ago
That comp $ is very reasonable in the abstract, what's not reasonable is comp:revenue. You can't be paying 15% of your revenue to a single individual, because almost by definition they aren't performing well enough to justify that salary.
- pbronez 2y ago
  Even when that person is the founder? Who created the thing and keeps it going through personal force of will? Doesn’t seem unreasonable to me. You want high quality people to be able to focus full time on stuff like this.
  - Workaccount2 2y ago
    Especially when that person is the founder lol
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I mean, she would make 3x more than that just being a software engineering cog in the machine. To me, a salary of $200k for this position looks like donating $400k a year to it. Plus your time. That seems pretty generous to me.
    - kelipso 2y ago
      Here we go with inflated salary guesses that a small percentage of programmers get paid. Also I doubt she decided to start a non-profit because she was good at coding.
      - johnnyanmac 2y ago
        a small percentage of programmers are C class executive. seems pretty apples to apples to me.
    - cudgy 2y ago
      I’m sure there are pizza delivery drivers that exist that make 100k+ per year. Therefore, all pizza delivery drivers making 36k per year are donating 64k+ to the pizza restaurants they work for. Really?
- crazygringo 2y ago
  That's not necessarily true, because revenue can be a poor measure of capturing value and scale in organizations that are mostly volunteer. If that individual is managing the process of successfully getting 1,000 people who volunteer 15 hrs/wk, which you'd otherwise have to pay let's say $30/hr including taxes, then that would be the equivalent of $22.5 million in annual revenue. Suddenly $285K in executive compensation looks perfectly fine. In some mostly-volunteer organizations, you will find that most of the money pays the professionals at the top, because you can't get that necessary expertise any other way. I worked at one once right out of college, at the bottom of the full-time-paid rung, and I had interestingly conflicted moral feelings about it. I spent a lot of time with volunteers and yet I was being paid. But I needed a job, I needed to pay rent. And the tech skills I was providing literally none of the volunteers could do. It made me question whether it was "fair" that all these people's monetary donations were going to paying my salary. But then again, I wasn't the one who set rents to be as high as they were in the city where the organization put its headquarters, and student debt doesn't get forgiven just because you work for a nonprofit.
  - cmcaleer 2y ago
    Your job as the top executive isn’t to get labor, it is to run a company (which sometimes involves getting labor). In order to do that you must manage your expenses. If you overspend on your salary such that you put the company in a position where the company is begging for 4 months of your salary as runway, you have failed at your job and you demonstrably were irresponsible, reckless in your spending and unable to make tough choices to ensure survival. In other words, you were not worth $285k.
    - crazygringo 2y ago
      That's not necessarily true at all. Sometimes organizations simply wind up in impossible positions. Funding dries up for macroeconomic reasons that you have no control over, demand patterns change, etc. There are plenty of failed orgs that would have failed even if they'd had true business geniuses leading them. You could just as easily assert that paying someone $285K got the expertise that kept the organization going for an extra 3 years than it would have otherwise, because someone with less expertise would have made a bunch of worse choices that it would have run out of money 3 years earlier. You seem to be demanding some kind of divine level of perfection here.
nothercastle 2y ago
300k isn’t crazy especially in SF that s not going up get you far
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  Perhaps we should stop concentrating so many opportunities in areas with exhausted resources that are needed to host an economic sector.
  - asah 2y ago
    Logic is backwards: most (not all!) high power candidates live in expensive dense cities to take advantage of easy access to other people, both for culture (e.g. art and live performances) and work (e.g. meetings, networking events, 1x1s, etc. Put another way, there aren't enough qualified candidates outside expensive cities and therefore the salaries typically tend to go up to cover those costs of living.
  - randomdata 2y ago
    Buyers are free to choose to buy from the company in Poducksville instead, but I suspect that, in the typical case, they'll never learn about said company because it takes strong network effects to get things off the ground.
    - lenerdenator 2y ago
      Every ecosystem - economic, ecological, or otherwise - has a carrying capacity. The SV/NorCal area is reaching that capacity. There are only so many dollars customers are willing to pay to get a quality product, service, or charitable act before the law of diminishing returns kicks in, and those dollars are what funds the compensation packages of both profits and non-profits. There is no infinite well of value (no matter what capitalism says), which means that there is a ceiling on things like salary and the things (namely residential real estate) that said salary can buy. If you pay a person $300k to do a job because that's what the local job market dictates in SV, are you really getting the surplus value to cover that salary? Can you keep charging customers that amount? Will you do increasingly alienating things that causes negative externalities (read: regulation) to be passed that impact your business model's ability to pay that much? You could very well be better off to hire someone at the $150k rate in a place like Kansas City or Minneapolis. Those aren't "Poducksville" but that's the competition the valley will begin to see.

kelseyfrog 2y ago

Question about the 2022 990 schedule b part 1. The contributors No./amount is restricted. What does this mean? Is it common?

uberman 2y ago

Just going to note that all of that was one person's salary. I question why a smaller non-profit based in Tennessee would need to pay their CEO almost 300k. Senior researchers where I work make half that while managing grant projects with twice the funding.

peanuty1 2y ago

Wow, that's a massive amount of money for just one individual. I'm disappointed to hear that.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
for a company in tech, is a 280k salary really that surprising? For a CEO it's on the lower side these days.