You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be taken away from you.
There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.
So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).
That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.
That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)
Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.
So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.
Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.
If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.
I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.
Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.
Some trick this with “consulting fees” to companies controlled by the top dogs, but it sat least something.
Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.
Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%
Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%
Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.
In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.
The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
- If you are in a lower tax bracket, the taxes are almost the same for everyone, so talking "net" is okay. If you have a more substantial income though, there starts to be more difference in net amongst people, as it depends on how your compensation is technically paid, and how much it is. So for the same gross, people can end up with different net.
- People tend to think in terms of what is wired to their bank account. For a long time, most (western) European countries did not have "source tax", meaning you would get your gross every month, and are supposed to save up for the income tax coming end of the year. That changed a lot in recent years, and more often now the income tax is directly subtracted from your monthly wages, which may direct people to talk in net.
> The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.
I get you, and that's not just because of gros/net, but also just the general cost of living that changes. I lived in a baltic country for a number of years with half the gross I had in western Europe, and felt substantially wealthier.
German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.
As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.
Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.
I was there in their earlier years. Ecosia set the standard for me what an ethical company should be like.
And hey odiroot ;)
The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.
I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.
Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.
They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.
I said the product will be better for me. I generally believe that things are better for me when they're trying to entice me versus when they're trying to entice someone who isn't me, but we can debate that, if you want.
In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.
They were very aware they were herding people like cattle into digital conclaves where they could be milked.
Strangers with candy are great for everyone, until...
The company is doing the work to earn that money.
Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.
At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.
A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.
"Oh no the entire company has wages - let's assume it's exploitation"
Is basic divisive language that just perpetuates the "world is bad and there is no lesser evil" bs that drives current news fatigue imo.
People are sure that 1 < 100000 but Google Vs ecosia is somehow more muddy.
It does get fatiguing.
Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.
If you want to compare the merits of two systems, you have to do it on legal grounds. If you allow cheating, then nothing is comparable, everything is possible, no system is better.
Or the Irish shenanigans of US tech companies.
or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers.
there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.
If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.
If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.
If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.
You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.
The profit is not the problem. It wouldn't be any better if the company made no profit.
Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.
So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).
But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.
Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.
I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.
In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.
Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.
Nah, the guys working to give people options and save trees. THEY must be up to something
But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?
I honestly have no idea
You can see US non profit compensation online - https://datarepublican.com/nonprofit/assets/
Many of the presidents/vps make in that exact range (~$200 - $300k), although there are other like:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...
Feeding America, which pays their CEO a tad under $1m.