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Comment by Hamuko | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Coinbase do something similar and only have 5% take the buyout option? How is this so different from what Coinbase did?

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Two theories I've seen:

1) Coinbase's corporate culture is more libertarian (where an argument on "don't focus on politics" may go across more reasonably) while Basecamp's entire corporate brand is based on power for employees.

2) Coinbase was about to IPO and thus taking a buyout is harder to justify financially, while Basecamp equity is essentially worthless.

Does Basecamp provide equity? And if so how does that equity turn into something liquid for employees - do they get a share of profits based on that equity?

They had what I understand to be a fairly generous profit-sharing arrangement once you hit a few years tenure.

can anyone ballpark numbers for what generous means? i know this question sounds nosy but i just want to know if this is closer to like 10k or 100k or 1,000k a year. i'm sure examples of each exist in the world under "profit sharing"

> Coinbase's corporate culture is more libertarian (where an argument on "don't focus on politics" may go across more reasonably)

How is it reasonable to enforce "no politics" when the company's culture is based on a niche political tendency?

The more reasonable interpretation is "no politics that looks different from our existing politics"

Smaller, more intimate company, possibly more peer pressure.

A selection bias at Basecamp, where they likely (whether intentionally or not) favored hiring politically outspoken, left leaning, progressive candidates. DHH has always been politically outspoken, so it's not a major surprise that they hired many similar types of people. Given how outspoken he is about literally everything, I'm almost entirely certain he would have been the first one out of the door if he were on the other side of this situation.

And then just the horrible way in which they mismanaged this, by announcing it publicly on a blog post (many of them heard about it on Twitter first) before actually talking with their employees.

ergodicity. the makeup of a 60 person company is much more about the company than the population average "anti-politics-ban" (which coinbase, a ~1500 person company, is probably closer to, even when not considering that you are probably of a certain leaning when you work at a crypto company)

but also i think the founders kinda blindsided all the employees with the announcement which probably made it worse.

Coin base didn’t have a ridiculous scandal that they implemented this against. If you read up on Basecamp this is all in response to their hilariously hamfisted response to the leak of an internal “funny names list” of their customers.

Coinbase employees are probably "hodl"ers.

I bet Coinbase didn’t blindside their employees with a public blog post

Coinbase was about to go public?

Their IPO was just a couple weeks ago.

By "about to", I meant within a year or so. But call me crazy, if there's a considerable cash out event within a year for equity I hold, I hang onto it.

1/3 of your company choosing the buyout is way more significant than 5%

I think there's another interpretation to his question - he's seriously asking why this decision had such a different result in this case, not trying to assert that this is a similar result.

if we are talking 5% of 100 people or 1/3 of 3 people you'd then the 5% is more significant.

I don't know how folks don't understand that - % and pure numbers tell different stories depending on scale.

If my hard drive has 5% remaining on it my reaction is going to be totally different if its a 250GB HD or a 10 TB HD.

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