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Comment by justrealist | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I'm following. They aren't getting new equity grants, they're de-facto out of the picture and just riding the valuation. They have 51% voting power but it's not obvious they are actively making decisions, rather than just holding onto power in just-in-case.

Sundar is getting new equity grants based on his "performance". That's not the same.

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Larry and Sergey have 51% voting power. They are the ones deciding how much Sundar is paid. Put it the other way: if they don’t want to pay him that much: they have the power to do so.

As the ultimate owners of the company by shareholder votes, they approved the compensation of Sundar, and are the decision makers.

no, they need to compete with other companies for the talent pool of CEOs. There is a market for such leaders, and if they drop the pay too low they will not get the same quality CEO, and they won't incentivize the CEO they have to the same extent.

> they will not get the same quality CEO

Hah!

Larry and Sergey hired Sundar to do a job (make money for shareholders aka Larry and Sergey). If Sundar doesn’t want to do that job anymore they’ll find someone else to do it better.

If I’m ignoring morality and just pretending I own the company and want to be richer, my opinion would be: if I think there is someone out there who will do a better job than my CEO and they are available, hire them no matter how much it costs. Whatever I’m paying them is peanuts compared to their impact on the company’s market cap. Nowhere in my option space is “keep the same sub-par CEO but pay them less”, that’s penny-wise and pound-foolish thinking.

Do you truly think there is no one on earth who could do a better job than Pinchai for, let's say, $80M a year? $40M a year? $30M a year? $10M a year? Why is there downward pressure on wages for everyone except for this particular position?

His pay is huge, but not huge when spread across 12K people. You couldn't keep them employed on $250M/3yrs

I don't really understand the point you are trying to make.

Perhaps not all of them, but you could certainly choose to keep some.

On the other hand, perhaps you could. Just dividing the numbers out doesn’t account for whatever value they’re producing.

If that person who can do a better job exists and can be identified, we should hire them and not waste time worrying about how much they are paid. It’s more important somebody else doesn’t hire them first.

Btw if you have some repeatable mechanism for proving the suitability of CEO candidates, maybe you should be doing executive recruiting for a liking.

On what basis are people saying that he's responsible for the company's increase in valuation over the past 8 years? For all we know he's just sitting in his office twiddling his thumbs.

If I own Google, I’m not willing to run the experiment of hiring a thumb-twiddler to run my trillion-dollar company to save a few hundred million dollars. I’m willing to pay an extra hundred million dollars to hire someone who appears to be 1% less likely to be a thumb-twiddler, even though I don’t have an oracle that can measure candidates perfectly. If that oracle existed, the market wage would probably be 11 figures instead of 9.

In reality, there are few people who have had to opportunity to show their ability to run Google. You have the small set of people who ran tech companies as big as Google, or who ran big parts of Google. Those people are in high demand, which is why 9 figures is the market rate for the most appealing of the bunch.

Risk? He's a known quantity. There may be 1000 guys more capable than Pichai. Alas, there are at least two thorny questions:

* How do you find one of these guys in the haystack with any degree of confidence?

* How much time would one of them need to build a professional network at the same level as Pichai?

FWIW, I do find these compensation packages obscene. Just working out same thinly disguised math.

CEO doesn't get a raise without it being okay with shareholders

Never underestimate the power of the veto. Those who hold it, certainly don’t.

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