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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

> Frind, who was a developer before he founded Plenty of Fish, built the site without any venture-capital funding. He has retained complete ownership of the company, which has 75 employees.

So he gets rich while his employees get nothing. Good for him, I guess.

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Way to assume the worst of someone without knowing anything about him, or any details of the situation.

I have good friends who work there, and they received generous bonuses when the acquisition happened last year, as well as having been treated well all along previous to that.

Just out of curiosity, what is a "generous bonus?" Competitive equity for an early employee on a $600m acquisition would have been, at a minimum, $600k. Did the employees receive even 5 figures?

I'm not sure what was shared with me should be public knowledge or not, but based on how the numbers were come up with, I think most employees would've received high 5's to 6's. Not sure about early employees, or if there really are any. Marcus had already made it quite big already (millions per month in ad revenue) when he was just a one man show.

If he paid a fair market wage and the employees didn't have the expectation that they were being compensated in equity, I see nothing wrong with this.

It's called risk/reward. Leaving salary on the table in exchange for ownership is common, but I presume his employees received fair market salaries and were paid on-time.

I'm sure their checks all cleared every two weeks.

Except for the salary and benefits they negotiated for.

Technically speaking, they got their salary.

Sounds like entitlement.

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