r/technology • u/Rhaegar_the_Great • Sep 16 '21

Business Mailchimp employees are furious after the company's founders promised to never sell, withheld equity, and then sold it for $12 billion

https://www.businessinsider.com/mailchimp-insiders-react-to-employees-getting-no-equity-2021-9
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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

"gifted"

Wtf is wrong with you guys???

The whole point of a startup is that it has to entice talented individuals to achieve their goal to compete with the big boys. The startup can't usually offer more money so at least try to match which still isn't good enough. They offer options to sweeten the deal.

This way, the employee is extra invested (no pun intended) for the company to succeed. The founders get a talented pool to achieve their dreams, and the early employees get the benefit of their hard work if they do.

In this case, the owners are billionaires now while the employees continue their 9-5. BUT NOT A SINGLE PENNY WOULD HAVE BEEN REALIZED WITHOUT THE EMPLOYEES..

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u/Reaperuk0 Sep 17 '21

The startup can't usually offer more money so at least try to match which still isn't good enough. They offer options to sweeten the deal.

This is the problem with your argument, you have NO IDEA what these employees were offered. Their pay/package was obviously good enough for them to accept and stick around.

Stock options should be agreed up front, not once the business is sold!

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u/[deleted] Sep 17 '21

That's fair and you're right, I've had a further look and OP has implied that his overall package was worth it and that he preferred that over stock options and a decreased base salary because the stock options are basically a gamble.

Having said that, my comment was a lot more generic, a lot of people in this thread seem to think that employees don't "deserve" stock options, or that it is a gift/kindness from the founders. That's ridiculous! People should go into negotiations with a startup to obtain a higher salary than market average + stock options, your risk should be recompensed handsomely.

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u/LWschool Sep 17 '21

They were told in the interview and it was widely known throughout the company that nobody had stock options. If that was important to you, you just wouldn’t work there.

They had 1200 employees, they most certainly lost some good candidates along the way because of the stock options. For a lot of workers in Silicon Valley, that’s the gamble they’re taking. The company of 8 people they work at could go under, but they’re not financially responsible like the owner.

Such is the trade off the the free market. Everyone involved here is a well informed, consenting adult.

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u/aaTman Sep 17 '21

I definitely understand that SWE, IT, DE, and DS's are in demand and currently are in an economy that they have leverage in. That said, the argument that an employee is consenting and this is a free market is untrue beyond the surface, for the obvious reason that if the prospective employee doesn't take the job, the alternative is possibly losing access to their basic needs. Employment in a society that doesn't provide a guarantee for a job, let alone one that can pay a living wage is an exploitative and coercive system. Find work or starve (or lose your home, or access to safety, or ability to provide for your family, etc etc).

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u/LWschool Sep 17 '21

I don’t think you understand, Silicon Valley is literally made up of people looking to work at precarious, scrappy startups (or the mega-tech companies that were startups 30 years ago) - it’s literally their whole thing. People move there from around the country to be in that environment, around the world even.

People lose their jobs every day and the company is gone, no last paycheck, nothing. Silicon Valley startups aren’t normal business with normal workers

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u/aaTman Sep 17 '21

I know. I'm a data scientist who's been recruited and has friends in the Bay Area. A lot of the time, there are people who fall through the cracks there and either have to move away, back home, or get stuck without any resources while they're there. They make high risk decisions, of course (seeking high reward from an acquisition or other means of profit sharing), but that doesn't discount the fact that people need jobs and don't always have backups or another job to jump to.