All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.
Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.
(I thought it was Poe's law.)
Also, let’s be honest here. It’s stock valuation. That’s basically good vibes and rich VC money. It’s not like the money came from real people.
I read that comment as sarcastic. I don't think your parent comment is praising him
It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.
Most recently, I got a "legitimate" (doxxed, "real") job offer via HN, got hired and scammed, wasted hours of my time. Crypto is scamsville.
* Locked out of traditional financial industry, more people of color are turning to cryptocurrency [0]
* Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard [1]
On the other hand blockchain and Internet ads and seemingly little else routinely get the 1-bit treatment on HN all the time: GP is going grey at the time of writing for saying roughly that crypto hurts orphans.
I don’t understand this, and since my theories about why tend to be pretty polarizing I’ll leave it at: I’m against 1-bit thinking on HN. I’m guilty of it sometimes, but I try not to be.
Edit: Misread GP with apologies. I think the larger point stands.
Are people angry at coinbase (and generally crypto exchanges) because they believe that exchanges allow vast amounts of people to speculate on the price of crypto and treat it as an investment vehicle when it was supposed to be a currency? And therefore nobody working for coinbase is capable of creating value.
Or are people angry at crypto overall because it's a wasteful cesspool and so because this guy took a product role in the crypto industry he's not capable of creating any value whatsoever so fuck him and fuck everyone that paid him?
Or are people angry with this guy because he's a bad or underwhelming product leader and the salary does not reflect the value he did bring to coinbase (perhaps you hold coinbase shares)? And therefore you feel he was somehow dishonest about his value and conned coinbase for millions and this reflects poorly on the startup/tech/vc industry?
In an environment like the USA (where many of the world's smartest tend to flock and extreme wealth is relatively achievable), being conniving is rarer than being smart, so that's what people value.
I don't think being conniving is better than being smart, just sharing an observation.
Do you disagree with the premise?
It's not what I value, it's an observation of what others value. I know people couch their own opinions in the views of others a lot, but nowhere did I express personal feelings.
It was just trying to dig one layer deeper to contextualize the situation OP was talking about (Americans valorizing confidence games).
- The world of Competition: Domination by action until one reaches a point of coldness that one loses oneself creating a "dark night of the soul" bringing change
- The world of Love: All efforts are aligned to create well being by avoiding harm of oneself and others.
If you are in the world of Competition, you will see the world in terms of black and white, gain and loss. Even my statement will be seen as a fool's position. One has to make a living in the world, even at the expense of others.
If you are in the world of Love, you will see the service you provide to others is an asset and you don't have to think about "Making it in the world", harming others at you own benefit because the world provides for you exactly what you need and you some how escape all of the consequences of others you have chosen the path of competition.
Which ever side you choose, will be the world you create for yourself and others. Right now the world of competition dominates, but it won't always be that way. Eventually we will all come-around, to love :D
Natural laws are neither cruel or kind. The are absolutely just. The cruelty of [competition] is a passing phase of evolution. - James Allen "The Competitive Laws & The Law Of Love"
AFAICT, peoples' moral leanings seem pretty consistent over history. (I could be wrong; I'm haven't studied that much history.)
1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.
2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.
3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.
4. You close the door and it locks.
The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"
If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.
I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.
I personally find the mental model that includes the dynamics of dominance and subjugation along with the responses of solidarity and resistance extremely helpful in understanding the world as a whole. Why are things a certain way etc? Because of X.
It is a physics, and is more completely predictive and reliable than a mental model that sees only oppression and anxiety (as many people are limited to) or one that sees only ambition and advantage (as many peoples' blinders dictate).
Going further, I would argue that the existence of exploitation in a system is in fact essential, as is providing tools to resist and join and brace against it. But eliminating it is impossible and a non-goal.
I believe these criticisms are true of essentially everywhere on earth. How much of Germany was French for a time or a vassal state of this one lord or another? Africa, the continent that invented slavery still enslaves people to this day. The Native Americans themselves faught with one another for land and treasure. Going back far enough, we cro magnons stole neanderthal land.
The United States didn't pop into existence in 1776 bringing with it some sort absolute barbarity that previously never existed, it's the other way around, the world was pretty backward and barbaric until the Americans got around to fixing it.
FWIW the parent you are replying to was clearly jesting with some sarcasm and not actually praising it in the way you seem to think.
EDIT: apparently not, according to the other replies by that parent. But looks like several of us read sarcasm into the comment.
There are 100s of millions of people in the US.
This is an issue from the top to the bottom.
We romanticize it when it's punching up (like at a crypto company that's probably been responsible for bankrupting a whole lot of suckers) but accepting it as a virtue also lets all those terrible bosses bask in the glory of how "keen" they're being by shaving off a bit extra for the retirement fund but punching down.
if not intended as sarcastic, it works as sarcasm quite well!
I assumed the poster was being ironic.
Might as well treat the execs and all VCs involved to a luxurious "fuck you" dinner!
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase/company_fin...
You're right that they've already passed the bag to investors, possibly a lot of that to retail - they can all still have a nice "fuck you" dinner in their honor!
I'm part of a local YIMBY group advocating for more housing and you see some really rough stories about people who are employed, work hard, and still can't put a roof over their heads. And then you see stuff like this.
/rant
I'm fortunate to live in a country that has a social safety net.
The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.
If your company says "we're going to pay you $400,000 and a commemorative water bottle", it's hardly fleecing the company if someone else wants to pay $40M for the water bottle.
How do we evaluate/measure if that is true or not?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-just-like-your-opinion-...
In another place where "dang" couldn't be mistaken for a person, "Dang, is Coinbase collapsing?" would also be acceptable.
Remember folks: Punctuation is the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma".
(And capitalization is the difference between "I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse" and something else entirely...)
Probably the same type that associates tech debt with “company is on the decline” despite strong revenue.
Come again?
To simplify, if you depend on market X then hedging your bet means also profiting if market X collapses.
2. This product turns out to be a scam
3. His fault for trying to sell a scam
That this crook extracts $100 million for this is a symptom of a broken society.
indeed you can
Also, ask CEOs and Chief Risk Officers from financial institutions if they worry about evaporations. I am not surprised though about him walking away with the money and your comment in the crypto world.
This is pretty telling: https://dune.com/cryptuschrist/Coinbase-NFT
$482 worth of volume traded in the last 24 hours. I don't know what their fees are, but if its like OpenSea (2.5%), then they made...$12 yesterday.
All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them.
They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on.
I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.
A society that rewards its very worst people with money and power is a society on the way down.
The cheap money era is gone now though.
And anyone with a "foundation" (recall sarah palin's daughter getting paid some ridiculous amount for her :foundation" to fight teen-pregnancy after been a pregnant teen??
And then evaporated I believe and dont think she had any impact on the problem.
This has nothing to do with "product", though.
Memestocks are down ~80%. Crypto prices down ~70%. Volumes are down even more in many segments... >97% for NFTs.
Just because Coinbase was at one time valued almost 10x what it is now, doesn't mean that was the correct value - and "product" ruined it.
So he really extracted more like 2% of the value of the operations of company itself.
This is his legacy
Excluding the stock performance entirely, they've released no particularly successful or even interesting products under his tenure.
He comes from Google where he worked on ads and shopping, so honestly that tracks pretty well. Google (not Alphabet) hasn't done anything interesting or innovative in a long time now either.
If capital is planning on being this dumb, as labor I have no problem whatsoever relieving them of their monetary burdens.
This morning, I went to a bakery and ordered a blueberry muffin. It was fresh and moist and delicious. I was satisfied. If it had instead cost the same money but been dry and crumbly and had a taste of old socks, I would have considered myself to have been "ripped off". But I put no thought into the transaction, I had a wide range of acceptable outcomes, and I did almost no due diligence beforehand to ensure I was going to get the expected result.
So now, you ask:
> Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off?
If transactions exist along an possibility-for-ripoff spectrum from "ordering a blueberry muffin for breakfast" to "hiring a C-level exec for X years for $YYY,YYY,YYY", then the closer you get to the latter transaction, the more specific the contract should be about expectations.
Every step along the way to having a signed contract normally involves an increased awareness of expectations by both parties. That's what the contract is. And the moment of signing a contract is an intentional decision to move forward with the transaction as specified. It's certainly possible to subvert the normal process in such a way that you obfuscate your intentions, but even then, the results of your intentions must show up in the contract language itself, or they won't count. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head, or you're not intellectually capable of entering a contractual relationship, the moment of signing your name to a contract is a moment where you are affirming that you aren't being "ripped off", that you've considered the terms and are willingly agreeing to abide by them.
Perhaps it's still possible to do all that and consider yourself to have been ripped off. And perhaps your examples are good examples of such cases. But if your board or C-level executives sign a contract for employment of a high-level executive which includes a 9-figure deal for compensation and they don't have more awareness than a poor person going to a car lot, they didn't get "ripped off", they're ripping off the investors or shareholders by collecting whatever salary they're collecting.
IANAL, also not a C-level exec, also not particularly smart about how crypto "works", but this all seems like fairly obvious stuff.
[EDIT] But perhaps it connotes differently outside American English? That could be.
I think he beats this.
His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-tier quiet-quitting.
He's not the only one whose done this: Balaji Srinivasan got hired on and did something similar with Coinbase's learning platform. Massive comp packages for executives doing C- work and still collecting atta-boys from the CEO. That guy used shareholder money to shitpost on twitter and build his personal brand.
Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it's still over a million dollars scammed from just the normal people.