Hacker News Reader

Comment by kzhahou | Hacker News Reader

> All executive officers and directors as a group (13 persons) .... 61.5%

LOL 13 people in the company own more than half. The thousands of employees get to split what's left after investors.

13 people will become BILLIONAIRES and centi/multi-millionaires, while the rest of the company that toiled for years gets (maybe) a down payment on a 1800sqft house on the peninsula.

Meanwhile everyone rails against wall street inequity and the Walton family and whoever else...

View on HN

Those aren't individual holdings (except for Jack and a couple of the small ones). They're holdings of VC firms which in turn means they're holdings of various large LPs.

Uhh, all these people are individuals: https://squareup.com/about#leadership and don't appear to be "representatives / holdings of VC firms".

See those little numbers next to the names? Those are references to footnotes. Try reading the footnotes.

With that tone you could at least link to the document you're referencing (not the same one that the above poster linked to):

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1512673/0001193125153...

The table on page 176 is what I assume you're referring to.

Granted the tone was a little sarcastic, but IMO that was largely in response to the parent comment starting with "uhh"

> 13 people will become BILLIONAIRES and centi/multi-millionaires

I think you mean "hecto" rather then "centi". A centimillionaire has assets worth on the order of $10,000.

Centimillionaire does sound better than thousandaire, however.

Centimillionaire is commonly used to refer to someone with assets of $100 million or more. From dictionaries, to lay people, to business publications, it's practically universal.

I understand what you were aiming for, however centimillionaire is the correct usage.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/centimillionaire

"A Deceased Centimillionaire Leaves $1.2B To Save Parts Of Rust Belt America" http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2015/07/22/a-deceased...

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Centimillionaire

"Unlucky Echelon of Ex-Centimillionaires Sees Stakes Plunge as Net Craze Fades" http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB972002051942176166

"A Deceased Centimillionaire Leaves $1.2B" But that person is a billionaire. =|

Maybe it's $1.2B of Evernote RSUs?

Many engineers seem to either be blissfully ignorant or just way too trusting during equity negotiations. Seems pretty common to just snow them with big absolute numbers and not even mention shares outstanding.

I know a guy that took a CTO role at a company post-YC acceptance but pre-demo day for ~5%. I can't imagine what the rest of the crew is getting. Why even join a startup at that point?

I've frequently seen advice that equity offers dangled to prospective employees in a pre-public company should be valued at $0/share, because of the uncertainty of any opportunity to realize any value from them, the possibility of dilution before the company becomes public, etc.

If that advice is followed, it sort of naturally follows that there is no real rational reason to be particularly aggressive during equity negotiations, and that trading equity for other compensation is a smart move.

> I know a guy that took a CTO role at a company post-YC acceptance but pre-demo day for ~5%. I can't imagine what the rest of the crew is getting. Why even join a startup at that point?

Because the immediate pay and benefits, rather than the speculative equity gamble, is good, and because the work is what you want to be working on. And maybe you like the people/culture, too.

Personally, I think you either should disregard equity altogether or accrue as much as possible if it'll be of a reasonable size.

If it should be priced at $0/share, then I'd like to have 100% of it, please :-) Oh, but wait.... the founders want to get mega-rich if it succeeds!

There is no inherent conflict between working on what you like with good people/culture, and also sharing fairly in the mega-riches in the remote possibility the thing is successful. But for some reason, employees routinely accept terms where they'll still be just making ends meet (at least in silicon valley, a million is barely a house) even if the company is so successful that the founders get to university buildings named after them.

How much of their own capital did the employees risk?

Years of their skills and labor that could have been spent working at another company (including competitors).

If they exercised their options and paid tax then potentially a significant portion relative to their net worth.

A few years of their lifes, an extremely limited and finite resource.

Since we're talking about specific sums of money, how much is that time worth? You have to put a number on it one way or another.

If we wanted to be arbitrary about it, we could pretend that a janitor's time is worth a trillion dollars per hour because said janitor's time is a finite resource that can never be recovered. However that doesn't do much for you when you have to actually decide how to pay a janitor.

The trick is he never mentioned what that time is worth. All he said was those few years of life was worth a few years, which were limited and finite.

It sounds like as a serial entrepreneur you like to decide how to pay janitors, because you can buy a few years of their time for a relatively low cost that you can turn into wealth for yourself.

When a janitor is working, he isn't working for $4 an hour or whatever it is you pay him. He's working for the rent & the food that will keep him alive, so that he will have time to continue to living, and that time is valuable to him. That's what he's getting paid, and that's why he's willing to work for you for $4. Just because it costs you nearly nothing to hire some people for an hour doesn't their time is worth only $4. It's worth a lot more than that. $4 can buy enough calories to last for days, and that time will be spent with his friends, family and his children(? possible if in India), and that's called "intrinsic goods", something money alone can never buy, because money only buys you time to acquire those goods.

directors rarely invest their own money in the company

For venture firms lack of GP's own money in the fund, though, is signaling "misaligned incentives". Some firms (Benchmark comes to mind) also have had funds where it was nothing but GP money, no LPs.

Oh, I meant senior execs at the funded company, not the VC partners.

61.5% to the 13 directors and 33.6% to investors = 95.1% Everyone else = 4.9%

At a $6B valuation, that's $294M for everyone else.

That is incorrect. The shares of Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital are shown both in the "5% Stockholders" and again shown in the "Executive Officers and Directors" section since both firms also hold seats on the board. Also, investors holding <5% stake are not represented.

The real math is 33.6% to investors holding a >5% stake, 38.8% to execs & directors, and 27.6% not represented (probably a mix of investors and the employee option pool)

That's actually not terrible. Looks like they have about 1000 employees, so that would be $294,000 per employee on average. Obviously a normal distribution will skew this pretty heavily so that the first 50 or so employees get most of the money and everyone else gets progressively less. Seems to be about normal for payouts on exit, though.

$294,000 -- Average employee

$1,500,000,000 -- Jack (25%)

$828,000,000 -- directors/execs combined (38.8%, per jwegan's comment), minus Jack.

Jack himself will get as much $$$ out of Square as all his employees combined.... times FIVE.

The other 12 directors execs will split a pot that's over twice as large as all 1000 employees combined.

That's cool for you, a 5000-to-1 discrepancy between CEO and avg employee? That's the reward system that we should all embrace in this modern age? How is it any different from the cigar-chomping tophat-wearing magnates of the past? Yeah, today the founders wear cool jeans and turtlenecks, and employees DO take home a nice little down payment, but the huge dropoff between the billionaire and the rank-and-file is as disgusting as ever.

What specifically is wrong with it?

Jack had (I assume) something that was 100% his in the beginning (or his and Jim McKelvey's - I don't know the story). They built something of value. They gave parts of it away, as well as cash, to people in exchange for doing things for them. Over time, the company that he owned continued to gain value, because people were willing to pay money to that company for the service it provided. At each point, every customer they served and every employee they took on presumably thought they were getting a good, fair deal. (If you're not getting a good deal, don't do business with someone.) At the end, the thing he owned was worth $1.5B.

What should have happened differently? In some alternative universe, perhaps everyone all along the way, every possible employee, could have demanded a larger percentage of the equity in return for their labor. But they didn't. I don't see why it's necessarily reasonable to, from the outside, say that anything is wrong, and reach in and start redistributing wealth. People can probably become billionaires today more easily because technology scales better than in the past, and because there's an investment environment that supports it.

Imagine I found a company solo. All by myself. I provide a service that lots of people are willing to use, and they're willing to pay me for. Maybe I've cracked the problem of Strong AI, and I'm selling my AI's services. It's software, and it scales well, so before long my company is worth $1B. I'm still running the company all by myself. How should it play out? If I brought on an employee at some point as a sysadmin should they automatically receive a percentage? (If they negotiated for that, then yes, otherwise no.)

Why are you looking at the % and not the $ value that they'd earn? 39.5% isn't a small amount either, whatever that will convert to in $ value.

Legitimate question being downvoted. Thumbsup..

Was that a question for me, or why not looking at $$ earned per person instead of the %?

Well, what is your opinion of the $ and % that non-founders get at startups (regardless of success)?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com