Things may change and you might sell after all, but that is not "withholding" anything, that is just things changing.
I can only imagine this story was spun by employee who saw the founders selling and getting bunch of money and now think they should have reaped some of the benefits.
Money and greed make people stupid.
What's wrong with offering equity and staying private? I don't see any deception there - say if Valve gave equity to it's employees, that'd be perfectly fine.
Of course any company can give out equity to their employees, but if it never turns into money then who cares?
I do agree those are quite different beasts and you want to have an idea of the relative likelihoods if you're making a decision based on them.
Let's vote on the $20mil bonus to the CEO or distribute it amongst the owners of the company. Oh, the CEO (and majority owner) gets it all.
What if the company never pays dividends?
Economically, they are the same. But they are taxed differently in many jurisdictions.
(Though in the case of buybacks, the shares you got as an employee are worth something, if the buyback is done as something like an auction.)
Just ask partners in law firms or consultancies, or ask yourself if you’d like to own stock in Cargill, IKEA, Mars, Brown Brother Harriman, Bloomberg, Chik-fil-a, fidelity, etc.
But the average private tech company isn’t like that. There’s probably 2-4 founders who pay themselves extravagant salaries and control all voting shares. Minority equity never gets a payday.
Tech companies are usually corporations (often C corps in the startup world.) What equity gets you in the two scenarios is completely different.
Tech start-ups are typically incorporated as c-corps as their structure makes it easier to grant options, startups don’t want to make tax distributions if they make money, LLCs can’t issue preferred shares, and s-corps can’t have more than 100 shareholders, etc. just to name a few.
No one at Cargill or Bloomberg thinks twice about whether the equity is in a c-Corp to LP (all else’s being equal)
Perhaps they should have. After all, without the employees' help Mailchimp wouldn't have been worth 12 billion today.
It is sad when people see others succeed and get angry.
When you accepted the job, you knew the terms. Those included not getting equity, and those included carrying some risk with known reward.
I don't see how the owners selling retroactively makes the risk-reward balance different. Unless you consider it a risk/downside that someone else gets a windfall and you don't get to share. That seems silly to me tho. How rich someone else is does not affect how much money I need to live, with a few exceptions (inflation, friends, power dynamics in pre-existing relationships).
Many people cannot afford to even own a home in the Bay Area because everyone else around is so rich. Relative wealth is important because "other rich people" drive up prices of everything, from housing, to groceries, to health care.
If my salary doesn't change, but the people around me get a 10% raise, my buying power decreases.
Apart from that, if people were serious about not selling, they’d make employees meaningful shareholders. Salary entails zero loyalty and zero stake in the company on the part of the employee. In the latter case, why would you believe that they wouldn’t sell? That’s what people do.
meanwhile they get to reap (in this case) 100% of the rewards from everyone else’s hard work. if that doesn’t make you angry, perhaps you should reevaluate whose interests your ideology serves.
I fail to see how. If you are compensated at the market value of your work, that seems fair and Mailchimp gave generous compensation.
You could argue that the gap between wages and capital gain has become too big, a point on which we will be in agreement but to be honest with you, I think the surprising part is that someone would want to pay 12 billions for a company with $700 million of revenue. Still I have found the market to be surprising for a long time so maybe it's time I reassess my expectations.
Since the founders didn’t really want to sell, they probably had to up their offer into ridiculous range.
MC paid off my house in 4 years, and I retired after another 4.
The hypothetical market value of employees in a world where Mailchimp did offer equity and employees stuck it out to reap that upside doesn't exist, so arguing the point makes no sense.
No, that's the value of MailChimp as a company. That includes the product, the branding, the management and the customer base.
> The value of one's labour is the value it generates - not what anyone is willing to pay for it.
The market value of anything is exactly the value that anyone is willing to pay for it and that's the only value that actually matters in this case. No one knows the exact value that anyone specifically contributes on a large project. How much of MailChimp value is due to its engineers and how much is due to its sales team? The only thing sure is how much the company agreed to pay its emgineers and that didn't include equity.
If you want to own parts of the company you work for, go work for a company giving equities. If you work for a company which doesn't, you are not entitied to a part of the company value when it's sold. That's literally the meaning of being an employee.
How did all these valuables come into existence? Through the employees labour. Thus the value of this labour must be equal to the value of these assets.
> The market value of anything is exactly the value that anyone is willing to pay for it
I never used the term "market value". Sorry if that is what you thought I meant, despite that I didn't use the term. And no, market value is not the only or the best way to measure value.
Yes, that's how employment works. Companies do not pay you exactly the same $$ you generate, that's just common sense? Why would they employ you if you cost just as much profit as you generate?
The question here is whether Mailchimp _exploited_ its employees by not offering equity. Unless an employee was lied to and told they might later receive equity, they all joined under the assumption that they were making a mutually beneficial agreement, and that the compensation offered by Mailchimp was worthwhile (as opposed to going and starting their own company or working for another startup that offered equity).
Every Mailchimp employee was welcome to start their own company if they wanted to capture 100% of the profits they generated.
No. The question is whether Mailchimp's employees would have worked for Mailchimp had they had a completely free choice and good knowledge of the value of their labour (e.g. valuation of the company).