LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Gives $14M in Stock to Employees | Hacker News Reader

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner Gives $14M in Stock to Employees

recode.net

156 pointslxm81 comments

I wouldn't by default assume some sort of sinister ulterior motive here. There's a fairly good chance this is exactly how it appears: A CEO taking the rather exemplary step of donating an entire year's worth of comp to his employees, in an attempt to offset external impacts that are only nominally within his control.

Sure, there's the possibility this act is purely for optics and employee retention. But if that's what drives people to be good human beings you won't catch me complaining.

And the "worth noting" section in this article is curious as well. Why does any amount of personal wealth degrade the value of this act? It's like the writer is saying "don't be impressed folks, this guy is still rich."

We should encourage and support acts like this, not couch our praise in snark and envy.

Agreed.

I think critically examining these actions can be useful, but cynicism only goes so far. Generosity is a good thing, and him sharing his compensation with employees is something that should be commended.

> Why does any amount of personal wealth degrade the value of this act?

It shows how much of his own lifestyle he is potentially sacrificing. To take it to the extreme: if he was giving up all his wealth to his employees, you would treat it differently to if he was giving 0.01%.

Edit: I think this is the most controversial comment I've ever made on HN. It keeps going up and down between -2 and +8..... I wonder why it's so polarising?

Probably polarizing because people believe so differently about giving.

Some believe that "good" giving means giving a large portion of what you have, not a small fraction.

Others believe a gift is good gift, no matter how small.

Others believe a $14mm gift is good because of how large it is, regardless of whether or not it's 0.01% or 100% of his net worth.

Others take offense when people try to dictate theirs or others lives by claiming a kind or charitable act is insufficient because it doesn't put out the giver as much as they should like.

And there are probably other ways to look at it as well.

This sort of debate always crops up when rich people donate money.

But up/downvoting isn't supposed to be based on how you feel about the comment but whether it adds value to the site.

Who says?

Common sense, convention, HN rules?

What HN rules?

My bad, like Six Sigma above said, the guidelines do not include such rule. Since HN evolved /co-evolved with reddit and follows many of the conventions even more strictly, I thought this is also an HN rule. Intuitively, it also makes sense - 'upvoting', or irl aknowledging things you disagree with is how you would aknowledge that you see the opposing argument as valid, and will address the disagreement in a response. As opposed to downvoting, or irl ignoring, comments that fall so far out of scope of civil debate and are not constructive.

I thought it said that in the guidelines [1] but I was wrong

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Exactly correct, there is the story in Mark 12:43 "Calling His disciples to Him, He said to them, "Truly I say to you, this poor widow put in more than all the contributors to the treasury; for they all put in out of their surplus, but she, out of her poverty, put in all she owned, all she had to live on." which a lot of people learned in Sunday school that teaches the "size" of the gift doesn't count as much as the "sacrifice" of the gift.

Some people internalized that to mean that gifts without sacrifice were worthless, but that was, in my opinion, the wrong take away. Every gift and every kindness has value, regardless of how hard it is to give. Its impact however can be moderated somewhat by the amount of sacrifice behind it.

And as most people also recognize that failing to provide the kindness when the sacrifice is minimal, is its own kind of problem.

When you use the "royal 'you'," inevitably someone will take offense, that they aren't like that. These sentences can usually be rephrased with "I."

The fact that he's already independently wealthy makes this act far less impressive. If it was a first time founder making a humble salary doing this, that would be completely different.

The same logic as: donating a kidney is less charitable if you have an extra. When will the meme of moral relativism die?

It shouldn't be surprising that we tend to measure charity by the sacrifice a persons makes, rather than the impact they have on the world.

> we tend to measure charity by the sacrifice a persons makes, rather than the impact they have on the world.

A perhaps unintentional critique of charity itself.

donating a kidney when you only have 1 is vastly more impressive

The point is the kidney isn't more or less useful.

It's two different ways of looking at charity. "Glass half empty" type of thing.

Also illegal and something no doctor would ever do.

Is this even charity? Does any kind of employee bonus scheme or pay raise now count as charity?

It's not charity, it's a CEO trying to increase staff retention. It doesn't need to be "impressive," but regardless, your cynical view of what constitutes charity is depressing to say the least. Weiner was under no obligation to do anything. He could have taken $14 million and chose not to. The fact that he already has money is irrelevant.

Also, I challenge you to find anyone who has been CEO of a publicly traded company for more than a year who isn't also independently wealthy.

I agree, and I think it's a win/win/win. Employees get a nice moral boost and get to pad their finances a bit, the CEO enables a long term bet on a future substantial gain of his preexisting position in $LNKD equity, and both sides get to feel that this was a nice gesture of good faith.

Even with the potential personal gain, imo there isn't much to criticize here. It's not like a majority shareholder getting a one time special dividend (I'm looking at you, PE funds) or something obviously sinister like that.

Surely "morale boost" ?

Donating to help employee retention is still good. Employees leave when the job is bad. If less leave that means less people are working jobs that they don't like.

Say what you want about LinkedIn as a product, they treat their employees really well. When I interviewed there a few years ago, their interview process was extremely supportive, as opposed to other companies. It really felt like they wanted you to pass their interview, and it impressed me. I didn't take their offer, but I also wonder if that was a mistake or not.

I find it surprising that they can treat their employees so well considering their revenue per employee is relatively low, ~$300,000 if I remember correctly. Regardless, Weiner's behavior does mesh with the feelings I had from the company in general.

That's low? Man. I gotta crack the whip at work.

Well, Netflix is $3 million, FB is $1.7 million and Google is $1.3 million (it turns out LinkedIn is ~$400,000), so relative to its peers it's low.

How are these numbers calculated though? I want to know how what percentage of these companies' total workforce is outsourced to contractors that are not included when coming up with the above figures. A company may be off loading a large chunk of the work to third parties while getting sweet gains and producing relatively higher per employee revenues.

If you factor in the people-hours behind the AWS services Netflix uses, I'm sure their number looks a lot different.

Do you mean to say that we should include the people who make the products consumed by Netflix?

That's a very odd way of looking at it. Is that because there are entire teams at AWS supporting Netflix, which makes them more like contractors?

The logic is that if you outsource your ops team to AWS you have less people but your revenue is still the same, you're just paying AWS instead of salaries.

So if we take the revenue per person number as anything significant then netflix skews that by using AWS.

Ultimately it's a number without much meaning.

Well, then, couldn't you subtract the cost of their AWS bill (or some fraction of that cost) from their revenue, to adjust for the lower headcount?

It would be difficult so no one bothers. How many "people" is monthly use of S3, DynamoDB, RDS, Route 53, etc. equivalent to? Its not easy or worthwhile to estimate. Revenue per employee can be a bit of a vanity metric.

well, the obvious solution is using profit/people rather than revenue/people, isn't it?

EDIT: ah, as another commenter mentioned, it is also true that you might be growing fast with low profit so I guess both measures make sense (or not) in different contexts.

It's because revenue isn't meaningful, profit is.

Profit is not always meaningful either. Running at full Op Ex (eg, hiring a larger team) can reduce profit to near zero, but if it leads to growth it's money well spent.

>but if it leads to growth it's money well spent.

...provided that the growth leads to more profit at some point in the future.

Turtles all the way down.

Depends a bit on perspective. The content that Google indexes (and puts ads on) is mostly created by third parties. Some for Facebook.

Earnings/employee is a much better metric than revenue. Netflix is higher up because they are primarily reselling, which usually translates to higher revenue and lower margins.

You're talking about some of the most successful companies in the field. Most companies will be low compared to them.

I think, you have mixed terms for revenue, earnings and profit.

It seems like earnings less cost of goods sold per employee would be a much better way of looking at the value added by employees. I think this would account for things like the AWS example below.

This was a very kind gesture. But there is no way this gift would remotely make up for the value loss experienced by the employees.

According to LinkedIn's site, they have 9,200 employees:

$14 MM stock grant/9,200 employees = $1,521 per employee

In order for this grant by the CEO to fully make up for the amount lost by employees in their recent stock crash, they would have had to have no more than $3,804 of LinkedIn stock ($1521/.40). This seems quite low.

According to LinkedIn's 10-K, LinkedIn has 6.1 MM RSUs outstanding, implying 663 shares per employee. The average amount lost per employee would therefore be: ($272(LNKD high) - $119(current stock price))*663 = $101,439

In other words the CEO's stock gift to employees would only make up 1.5% (1521/101,439) of the total loss from the recent crash.

There are many reasons other than money to work somewhere: how rewarding the work is, how much you enjoy working with your team, and the impact you are having on the world. Those are things that this kind of analysis would not capture.

Not all positions have stock grants, e.g. Sales.

That skews the numbers even more towards huge losses for employees with stock grants.

but the loss (from the stock tanking) would be the same regardless of how many employees had options though, no?

Loss per employee would go up, since the number of employees with options is less than originally assumed.

This money is going back into the option pool which is used for new grants, its not going directly to the currently employees.

With a 15.7B mkt cap the 14MM represents ~8.9bps, I haven't kept up with his ownership but I remember looking at the S1 and I believe he used to own 4% of the company.

This is an important but mostly symbolic move.

It reads to me he's talking about the pool of equity allocated to this year's grants. At companies like LinkedIn, you receive new grants every year to layer your equity and keep you there past your 4 year mark. Everybody does it differently, but it's usually something like "We have $x in equity comp available, lets do some magic calculation based on base pay and annual review to allocate this between our employees."

Also, I can't speak to this personally but I've heard that LinkedIn offers are heavy on cash, less equity.

I received an offer from them early last year (declined) and cash compensation wasn't any higher than the other offers I had at the time, but the equity was substantially higher.

It would be cool if more of the senior management with >$5M options did that. If the company prospers they could easily negotiate high rewards again. Its normally the rank and file who get standardized bit-sized options.

Quote:

That’s because, according to a LinkedIn spokesperson, Weiner is forgoing his annual stock package so that employees can have it instead.

Huge kudos CEO taking responsibility (even though its probably not his fault) while making sure employees don't get impacted.

Does anyone know how this $14M compares to what employees lost recently?

That would be a depressing number to find out.

see my comment above

Here's a totally wild guess. Wikipedia says LinkedIn has 8735 employees. Let's guess that before the crash, employees had an average of $50,000 of stock each. The price is down about 50% the past year.

8735 * 50,000 * 0.5 = $218 million lost by employees.

Do you have any evidence that $50k is an average amount of vested stock held by an employee? If not it might as well be $5k or $500k, doing the math doesn't help much.

This gesture gives no indication of distribution. It could got to the top 14 execs. Back scratch back style.

Wikipedia tells me LinkedIn has ~9000 employees.

So even if it's fully distributed that's about $1500 per member of staff.

Is that exciting? I mean, if you were on minimum wage it might be. Otherwise it sounds like inflation (5% on $30K). How much do LinkedIn employees earn?

They make as much as any Software Engineer in the Bay Area, working for names like Google, Facebook and Apple. So yes, if it is distributed evenly across all employees, it will be negligible.

A $1,500 bonus would be huge to thousands of people working at LinkedIn. For every highly paid software engineer there are dozens of people working in HR / Accounting / Administration / Facilities / Sales earning a fraction of the pay that developers are earning -- with largely the same costs of living.

Instead of a symbolic gesture, perhaps let your employees work remote and save a real amount of money (compared to token income)?

That'd be far bigger news.

And it's far bigger work, with far bigger implications and potential unintended consequences. Telling America to just get off of its collective fat asses and walk around more than once in awhile would do more than an infusion into Medicare, but Medicare money isn't nothing for the people who need it.

Ideally, the CEO could/would do more. But just passing it off as a symbolic gesture raises the question: well, if it's so symbolic -- and thus, of no real sacrifice to the CEO, then why don't all the other rich (and far richer) CEOs do it, such that this CEO's offering doesn't make news?

Are you sure there employment ratio are so skewed away from developers?

Dozens may be a bit of an exaggeration, but they give a big picture breakdown of their employment ratios in their annual report;

    As of December 31, 2014, we had 6,897 employees,
    consisting of 2,838 employees in engineering, product
    development and customer operations, 2,989
    employees in sales and marketing, and 1,070
    employees in general and administrative functions.

So even broadly, 60% of the company is definitely non-engineering. From a quick glance at their 10k, it looks like about 1,700 people are in the product development group, so at minimum 75% of the company is non-engineering. Whether it's 1/5 engineers or somewhere closer to 1/10, it's hard to say but it takes a lot of people to run a company, and the majority don't make 'engineer' salaries.

Thanks for doing the legwork to my throwaway remark!

$1500 is certainly exciting for a lot of people! Really, if someone gave you $1500 off the street, would you be like, "is this exciting?"

Applaud him for doing something good. $14m is a lot of money for any individual to shell out and $1500 is "exciting" to most normal people.

Does it come with the catch that I have to join his professional network? Do people working at LinkedIn have to use LinkedIn? I always wondered the same about Facebook, some awesome engineering challenges but many techies I know, including myself, have zero desire to have a facebook profile

I imagine they check but I also imagine you won't be disqualified because you don't have a profile.

Why does the YC application ask for your HN username?

I think you've missed my point a bit here -

I'd be excited if someone arbitrarily gave me $10 off the street.

My employer giving me a bonus of that amount would be different though, because the nature of the relationship there is very different - I give up a large part of my life to work there.

I'm mostly just asking whether $1500 is significant at LinkedIn - you seem to think I'm making the claim that it's not. Whether it'd be useful for the average person is not that relevant (because it's not applying to them).

Inflation hasn't been 5% in about two decades. 2015 was about 1%, most 2016 estimates are around 2%.

And the $14 million goes into the grant pool, so it's only accessible by those with grants in the first place.

The guy does a good thing and recode is trying to justify that hey it was not a big deal because he already is rich and has a lot more stock!

At one end journalists cry out aloud about how big CEOs are hoarding cash and stock without giving much to employees, and when someone does the opposite you try to justify.

I am not sure what the complete implications of this act are.

Were these options exercised? Does Jeff benefit from not having to pay taxes on the paper gains he would have realized had he kept these to himself?

Jeff is a great guy but I personally do not think that this act really means anything substantial for the employees.

Definitely a kind gesture from this CEO considering that some people won't even leave a tip when they're served wild caught fish by a minimum wage employee at their favorite restaurant, however, this is a first-world donation. Sure, we shouldn't judge his donation on how much he sacrificed personally, but IMHO it would have more impact to human progress if he actually sold the stock to help refugees that actually are in need of housing, bread, and water.

If what I wrote above doesn't make sense to you, perhaps the following quote will resonate with you: "The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have little." -Franklin D. Roosevelt

If the CEO is not sure where to donate to 'provide enough for those who have little', then giving to those that 'have much' and having them make the decisions might actually be a good choice.

I never felt too positive about piling up of money for years/decades to donate it later instead of distributing it among the people in the organization now.

Sure, if you believe in an impactful plan that needs lots of money. But even then I could see arguments against it.

To everyone criticising this or unimpressed by it - let's hope none of you ever becomes a victim of such a despicable act, and let's hope as well that the rest of us don't become less likely to either give or recieve in response to your comments which I find rather misguided.

Maybe someone will fix the web interface then.

I would sell that stock ASAP.

Totally anecdotal and totally objective, but he's one of the hottest ceos in the game

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