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Comment by ethbr0 | Hacker News Reader

@&$#

But can't fault them. Congrats to the entire mailchimp team! You all deserve all the rewards, especially for bootstrapping.

Hope everyone there made out like bandits, and may this give them the financial freedom to pursue new passions in their lives.

For those curious about the founding story, How I Built This did a podcast with Ben Chestnut (released July 12, 2021): https://www.npr.org/2021/07/09/1014699766/mailchimp-ben-ches...

Small tidbit: mailchimp was a major pivot into SaaS (before that was a phrase) from another already successful services business (building websites). The team realized scaling a software product was a better idea than selling their time.

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Spoiler: only the two founders are making out like bandits. Mailchimp employees aren't given equity.

Wow, the salaries look very meh, especially considering there's no equity. They must have really good work-life balance or something.

Atlanta is only recently getting high paying engineering jobs in volume. They've been able to compete with quality of life and profit sharing up until now.

Context: at least some of those salaries are in Atlanta, where you can make 1/3 of a west coast salary and still live a pretty nice life.

When we were a flat engineering team, profit-sharing and growing it was an amazing place to work because everyone was very good at their job and cared about making a lean and self-sufficient profit machine.

From 2015 on the corporatization took over, the flat hierarchy was completely discarded in favor of multi-tier CwhateverO monster departments, team fragmentation and purposeful reassignments, and basically a 100% annual employee count growth mandate.

That's also around when the big raises and bonuses stopped, and everyone was assigned to a role and level which has a set salary value range etc.

For me 2018 was the end of my patience for it, but I think some are trapped believing in an older version of themselves.

To be fair, much of what you describe is just part of becoming a mature company. At some point, flat can't work anymore. At some point, the impact of individuals is diluted and the number of people needed is so high, that outsize rewards become impossible or risk being sure signs of inequality.

As much as I appreciate equality goals (what role, level, value ranges are there for), and believe their benefits outweigh their costs, they function by lowering ceilings and lifting floors. The only way to earn outsize bonuses these days is to be directly tied to outsize earnings (e.g. commissions), and that's hard to do with engineers.

The engineers route to that kind of risk/reward dynamic is by founding / joining something early (that actually grants options) and trying to make it huge.

"mature" is the wrong word here. We were "mature" for a decade before this expansion. We had no debt, big profit margins, and our customers loved us so much we didn't need advertising to have exponential growth.

Our decision to "grow up" was more a decision to try addressing non-email markets, and hire so many people and buy so much real estate that profit then depended on that choice.

Now they have half the talented staff because of boneheaded management decisions, half the loyal customers because the team stopped being able to address their needs, etc. If that's "mature" to bankers or VC's then I'd call them over-mature.

That’s fair, but you have to recognize that couldn’t have lasted forever. Your space was on its way to heavy commoditization, like software spaces almost always are.

Ignoring the shifting sands would’ve likely meant a more gradual decline, instead of an unpleasant growth, and would’ve almost certainly yielded less than the chosen path.

The talented people and half the customers would’ve likely bailed either way.

You sound right.

And that makes it even more depressing.

Oof. Hope there are some nice bonuses to go around, then.

From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work. But I guess most of that will change when the corporate overlords decend and start optimizing things.

> From what I heard from friends, it was a great place to work.

Not in the scheme of things, especially with regard to comp. Plus, they had a shitty PHP stack that was a spaghetti web.

I desperately tried to convince my Atlanta Mailchimp friends to quit and join me at a pre-IPO company. No takers. After our IPO, I made a life changing amount. Enough to retire before 30. They got paltry "bonuses" every year.

Mailchimp had some weird cool aid that made people like working there despite there being plenty of better alternatives. I just wish I could have convinced my friends to leave.

Working at a company that actually makes and pays cash is better in all ways than a pre-IPO startup that might potentially go that route and earn you some money then.

A company can just be a great place to work. No cool aid necessary.

My salary alone was better than Mailchimp comp. SF wages in Atlanta. Plus, we were already unicorn status and growing rapidly.

It would have been a solid choice.

That’s possible, and probably a better idea if you’re optimizing for comp.

But there’s a lot to be said for staying to work at a company you love and enjoy, especially if your compensation is already enough for a very comfortable life.

This may come as a shock to you, but for most people life is not just about money.

What a non sequitur

My read was that founders were self-taught coders, and that describes the friends who worked there as well.

Imposter syndrome is a bitch, when there's always someone better than you out there, so there's probably a lot of Kool Aid in making people feel like they've made it, are part of the tech party, and are valued employees.

And working customer-facing is always a cooler cocktail party gig than being a master of the universe behind the curtain at Oz. For some.

Different folks optimize for different things. I doubt they'd turn down you buying the next round of drinks, and for some people... that's enough.

Rumors say that there is "$300m for “employee transaction bonuses” (or 2.5% of the deal)"

... divided among 1,200+ employees.

...spread over three years

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