"Everyone gets the same amount of equity as the CEO" would be a morale booster. "Everyone gets paid the same as the CEO" is at best a nice-to-have.
In practice I think that motivated people are fine with non-wild salaries, but with early stage stuff it’s way too common to see people try to use equity as a replacement for salary. Your employees stressing out over money will cause them to perform less well.
Anyway, the beauty of such transparency is that you can decide whether it is fair for you or not.
This is inherently unequal as explored by Dan Olsen in The Line Goes Up
If you weren't born yet, you lack access to that equity
I have no interest in being rich, personally.
Not trying to pass judgement on anyone, just genuinely curious how common it is in SV to be unhappy with an income that would make you comfortable, but not rich.
How many people who live in this area are in said top 5%?
I live in probably the most expensive country on Earth, Norway, and at that wage I could work for 10-15 years, and with some smart, fairly conservative investing, assuming good times in the markets I could easily get retired at 40-45 if I wanted to.
Granted I live and generally prefer a very frugal lifestyle even when I am making good money, but still by my back of the mental napkin estimation I could even have 2 kids, a spouse, house and car and still have a ton of disposable income left over to save/invest.
Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?
Still ~half my bizarro world number though, hot damn.
750 is a pretty damn big one bed(room?) apartment for sure, and with the perks, prime location and presumably high end building standards, the price seems very reasonable. Probably similar to what I'd have to fork out for a much more central apartment in Oslo, at a similar size and standard.
Kinda yea.
The average rent in the bay is around $3500, but for a house that is big enough for a family (eg. 3br, garage, etc) you're probably north of $6k. Don't forget, in America, you have to consider healthcare and other costs that may not be priced equally in Norway. The bay also has more expensive food, gas, and other daily expenses etc than the much of the rest of the US.
For example, I pay ~5k a month for a 2Br unit with a garage, at roughly 1k sqft.
And that's it. Overnight admissions to more or less any health institution is completely free of charge(dental care is a whole other ballgame though, it's not socialised very much yet for adults, though slowly getting there). Similarly if I had kids, future tuition would not be an issue since Norwegian universities don't have tuition.
Thinking about it more it wouldn't be possible for me to live as frugally as I do in the US. Not without sacrificing health care.
To put my frugality in context:
Rent is ~$1K/mo(including electricity and fiber internet), which is about 60% of my income(or rather, 60% of 1/12 of what I earned total last year after taxes. It's complicated since I only take short-term consultancies through friends if they look fun. Most of the time I don't work, except on passion projects). That rent gets me a ~50sq. meter basement apartment on the outskirts of oslo, right on the edge of a beautiful river valley in an affluent neighbourhood. Apartment is nice, the juxtaposition of suburb and wilderness is ideal for my outside cat, who has a cat flap and is almost entirely independent if I fill his bowls once or twice a day. I still manage to afford good pet insurance, and a little saving headroom which I split 50/50 into a rainy day fund and fairly risky(but tiny amounts, so it doesn't feel so scary), cheap stocks. 4x so far. I save half my stock returns and reinvest the rest.
I buy dry foods in bulk, perishables at a discount. My annual transportation budget is about $300(public or legs only).
I guess you could say if SVers are in a high cost, high income bubble, I exist in the opposite cut every cent because I like the challenge and I hate working bubble. So I get pretty flabbergasted sometimes when exposed to the numbers floating around the SV bubble.
Mind you Oslo is the most expensive part of Norway in terms of property; I could go rural and probably decimate my rent but I'm too urban for that.
I moved from a LCOL where I paid $1200/mo in mortgage + escrow on a 2600sqft 4br house, to a MCOL where I pay $3600/mo in rent for a 1200sqft 3br townhouse. The Bay Area is a HCOL in the US, for a similar property what I have now, it'd be $5k-$6k/mo in rent, plus everything else is also more expensive. Back of napkin, $191k/yr is roughly $128k/yr after taxes, which is roughly $10800/mo after taxes. If rent is $6k/mo, utilities are $400/mo, a car fully laden is $700/mo, and food is $1000/mo, you're left with just $2700, and I'm ignoring significant other expenses. If you have a child (which I do), childcare in SFBA is around $2500/mo, it's around $1800/mo where I'm at now.
Best case scenario, you can save $2k/mo, which puts you ahead of the majority of Americans. You're also renting, which has a continually rising cost which you have no control over. To buy a house you need 20% down to get a traditional mortgage, a typical (for the rest of America) home in SFBA is $3M on the low end, but probably closer to $4M. To save up the $600k you need for a down payment on a $3M house, it'll take 300 months saving $2k/mo, which is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. So it'll take you 25 years, just to save the down payment so you can get a 30 year mortgage for a house in SFBA on $191k/yr. In 25 years, that $3M house /will/ be at least $5M just due to inflation, which means you're hitting a moving target, if you predict the rise and target it for savings, now you need 500 months or just shy of 42 years to save the /down payment/.
The SFBA is nearly the most expensive place on Earth to live. Norway doesn't even come close.
I make >$300k/yr in an MCOL, I did an analysis and determined if I wanted to move to the SFBA without a massive sacrifice in quality of life for my family, I'd need to earn at MINIMUM $700k/yr to match what we already have, and more realistically closer to $900k/yr. $191k/yr is not even worth considering in SFBA.
EDIT: That said, if this was a remote offering, that's a very decent salary in most of America, and Oxide is a very interesting company with people working there I'd love to work with just so I could be surrounded by their brilliance.