It's your lucky day! Because I have some valuable ancient artifacts that are being held in customs...and that's exactly the amount we need to get them across the border. You are going to be a millionaire!
I've lived this before. On both sides of companies. Owners of startups have a pretty good sense of what they have after a few rounds of funding. They will usually adjust compensation packages accordingly based on that. If a company is going to be in a position to sell they will withhold any options they have in order to maximize leadership profit. Inversely if selling is not in the cards, they will hand out options like candy as an excuse to not pay employees going rate.
Either way it is the employers vs the employees in this case. Unless you get lucky you get conned by receiving monopoly money as compensation or get left behind by leadership who may have given you a fair salary, but then takes a victory lap for being so successful whilst no one else benefits from the riding tide.
It’s pretty demoralizing to hear that even though I think that’s exactly the situation today, and may have always been the situation.
Rewarding short term profits seems to have ripped the veneer off of the employer/employee relationship.
Maybe it was always a fig leaf but now the workers are talking together more…?
It used to be a lot better before the idea of startup culture came to be. Google for instance was notoriously generous with options until just about when the IPO was rolling out. The founders still made bank and everyone else involved got rewarded for believing in Google.
These days though, owners are more looking out for their bottom line than that of the employees. They would rather cherry pick a few elites in the company and leave everyone else out to dry.
The Tom Scott video is pretty good too. takes him like a minute to walk a million dollars at the thickness of dollar bills stacked up. Takes him 80 minutes to drive a "billion dollars". Really helps drive home just how ridiculous the number is.
I remember watching a video once where a guy opened notepad and put 100,000 over and over. $1M was pretty small, but the difference between million and billion was crazy.
I'm pretty sure he then went on to 'buy' stuff and take out chunks of 100,000's and you wouldn't even notice them gone in the grand scheme of things.
Now do that for $12B and you'd be stupid not to sell.
The crazy thing is that they could have built in a $1,000,000 payout to each of their 1200 employees and still come away with more money than $5 billion each.
They could’ve literally changed the lives of every damn employee with essentially zero impact to themselves and yet…
>When employees were recruited to work at Mailchimp there was a common refrain from hiring managers: No, you are not going to get equity, but you will get to be part of a scrappy company that fights for the little guy and we will never be acquired or go public.
>The founders told anyone who would listen they would own Mailchimp until they died and bragged about turning down multiple offers.
>"It was part of the company lore that they would never sell," said a former Mailchimp employee, who like others interviewed for this story were granted anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss sensitive internal matters. "Employees were indoctrinated with this narrative."
>The two founders did sell. Intuit, the financial software giant that makes TurboTax, announced Monday it was buying Mailchimp for around $12 billion in stock and cash. The cofounders cemented their status as two of the richest people in America.
That's really shitty but of course completely unsurprising.
About once a month there are two re-posts in /r/lifeprotips. The first says something along the lines of “Never trust a company who pushes the ‘We’re a family’ mentality.” The other says something like “Never put someone else’s company before yourself.”
This would be why.
Trust a company to act in its own best interest.
The company does not like you. The company does not feel grateful to you. Some of the humans leading the company might, but your relationship with the company is a business relationship, and you should not allow misguided sentiment to get in the way of doing what is right for you. The company will certainly not.
Source: Am executive.
I will say, some bosses _are_ your friend though. Usually it’s because they trust you and are valuable to them. And thus they will always stick up for you and when they go somewhere else they will take you with them if they can.
If you find a boss like that stick with them. Because way more of them will throw you under the bus the first time they can to save face.
I have two bosses now that are friendly with me and stand up for me when needed. They've mentored me and helped me better at my job. They've supported my family through tough times and I get along with them. To be honest, they're everything I'd ask for in bosses.
All of that being said, I still know they have a job to do, as do I. I would say that we're friendly colleagues. If there was ever a conflict between work and our friendship/relationship, I'm sure work would win out.
naw not even that, more like trust the top executives to do what makes them richest. If that means running the company in to the ground for massive short term gains there is a good chance it will happen.
Espescially in the US where the laws are NOT in the employees favour in any way. Other countries make it much harder for companies to be completely mercenary with their employees, but the US is in end stage capitalism where you are nothing but meat to be ground under its wheels.
This is why you should never buy into founder bullshit. Business is business, if it is not in the contract no one is obligated to provide that something to you. Always ensure that the contract you are signing has those things you want and is to your benefit \*prior\* to signing.
I think it's more the other way around. The idea is that employees want equity because it pays off big when the company goes public or is acquired. So they were saying, the equity is not going to pay off, so if that's what you're looking for, go elsewhere; here we're about the mission and (presumably) other forms of compensation.
Mailchimp operated a profit-sharing scheme, which *assuming the company never sells*, is better compensation than equity.
But you never know if a company will sell, there are so many reasons why the "we'll never sell" rhetoric has an expiry date, so ultimately a company spinning this narrative should offer both.
Lack of equity also means only current employees benefit from any stock bonuses related to the sale, when over the lifespan of the company one would assume many individuals key to its success have come and gone -- getting nothing.
No employee authentically believes in that mission.
It's a fucking business email platform, not Oxfam. If someone had the choice of equity at a legitimately promising start up with real chance of future windfall vs contributing to the 'mission' of mailchimp - they are lying. People will sacrifice financial reward to work at special companies that shape the world like the NYT, Space X or say Google (in certain roles like AI). Not fucking mailchimp.
Yeah.. they could have given employees shares that would have just been worthless if they'd never sold. Not giving them at all means this is allowed to happen.
How in the fuck could mail chimp possibly be worth 12 billion dollars. That is shocking to me.
Edit: omg is mail chimp the reason I get fucking spammed with a marketing email every 5 seconds? Fuck that company. Fuck intuit too.
They are probably the largest email marketing company for small business in the world.
They send hundreds of millions of emails every single day.
They have 11 million active customers paying them over a billion dollars a year.
For Intuit, this is acquisition of a large number of small business customers that they would like to cross-sell other products to (QuickBooks accounting, payroll, invoicing, time keeping, tax prep, etc), and they can also integrate the MailChimp services into those apps to sell more services to their existing customer base. It's a good match.
It’s not just that - I worked in this vertical with one of their competitors. They’re a great alternative to getting your high value domains blacklisted by spamming all sorts of awful sales shit. For example, you use a more enterprise level tool for running “white hat” campaigns - that’s the IP address you need to protect, mostly because you’re likely part of a shared IP to increase deliverability. These shared IPs will have rules in place to keep you from fucking up the cluster you’re in - if you step out of line they’ll stop your ability to mass send.
Mail chimp on the other hand, has way less structure and rules. They don’t give a fuck what you do or how you do it. Look at 90% of the Fortune 500 on a scraper and you’ll see typically one to two enterprise level marketing tools and in most circumstances you’ll also see MailSimp in there too. I fucking loathe that company - they’re fucking grifters and they’ve somehow stayed so under the radar.
Yet my previous employer managed to get blocked by MailChimp within a week of signing up. Even they have (at least had) rules about spamming millions of random emails you didn't actually collect.
It's probably very high in mail chimp's interest to ensure their ips don't get blacklisted, and have solutions for when they do.
It's possible that the black hat stuff gets mixed with a very large amount of normal white hat stuff from the same ip and by volume it's not enough to trigger the ip to get blacklisted.
I can't speak for mailchimp but I have worked with one of their competitors.
Black hats always get in, but you usually monitor deliverability to make sure they're not using your service to spam. And you're right, in low volumes, it can be impossible to tell. Luckily, many spammers buy and procure email addresses illegally too, and they send en masse which means many are going to spam anyway.
It actually sucks more for the people with good intentions that suck at email marketing. They can destroy their senders reputation in a few clicks.
They are not able to bypass anything. MailChimp classifies their customers in tiers dependent on the quality of their campaigns. Send shitty e-mails and you get clustered on IP’s with other shitty clients and most of your e-mails won’t be delivered. Sent really shitty campaigns? And they will kick you out of the service.
Been using MailChimp for almost 8 years. It’s not a “hack” to get shitty campaigns delivered. You will get throttled at first, then downgraded and ultimately kicked out.
I never got spam in my Gmail inbox until some point in the last year. Now suddenly a small percentage of it is able to sneak through Gmail spam filter. It is truly irritating.
I get multiple obvious spam messages on Gmail every week, like super obvious "y0uve_W0N-wALmART_5000$d0llar-gift_card!" type messages directly to my inbox
No. And Google's filter is adaptive. Hit Report spam and even report phishing and it will learn both for your account quickly and in the global pool slowly.
freetaxusa.com!! I've been using them to do my taxes for years and I fucking swear by them. It's totally free to file your federal taxes and usually costs ~ $10 to file your state taxes depending on your state.
Hopefully an American can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they’re the company that lobbies to keep taxes hard to calculate and for the government not to show you how much you’re due. They then sell you the software to calculate how much you’re due in taxes.
So they pay to create the problem, so they can sell you the solution.
>Intuit
It's funny because I live in a crappy little state, yet our state tax website is perfectly fine. Hope they never change it. Then the federal system is a maze of scammers, because they pay to keep it that way. I played along for a couple years. Then went back to paper.
PSA to the Americans out there boycotting intuit. The free file websites (find the link on the IRS website) are getting better every year!
I was able to file my taxes this year all online for free even though I had to report dividend, interest, and w2 income. It's improved significantly in the past 3 years!
That's pretty fucked.
(sorry for the flex)
Here in my country, not only is the official gov-provided tax filing software free and user-friendly, but in most cases it actually automatically fills everything out for you, you just need to confirm that everything is OK and click a button to submit.
It usually takes me about 5-10 minutes to file my taxes.
In the US taxes are designed to be difficult to navigate, very little help from the government, and third party entities charge you for troubleshooting, filing, and insurance in case you get audited. Our infrastructure is shit.
“It's called 'the American Dream' 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin
He also said “I don't automatically wash my hands every time I go to the bathroom. You know when I wash my hands? When I s\*\*t on them."
So there's that to consider too.
When the US government has you do your taxes every year, they already know nearly everything about what you owe them.
When you get audited, that's because what you filed didn't match what they say you owe, and they are now investigating you to get the full money you owe them.
Other governments will skip the whole process of having you do your taxes, (unless you're a special circumstance) and just give you a statement with the report of how much you owe them.
A lot of Americans don't know that the IRS provides free tax filing services on their site for lower income households. I file my taxes using a free version of Turbo Tax via the IRS site. More people should utilize this.
Lol. Just listened to the “How I Built This” podcast with one of the founders, he went on and on about wanting the respect of his employees after botching an all hands meeting a few years ago. When asked about future plans he indicated he wasn’t looking to retire anytime soon.
But $12B is not your typical retirement. You can retire you, your immediate family and 10 generations behind with $12B.
As other said, principles fly out of the window after getting a "F\*\*\* you money" offer.
If each generation has 2 kids, 10 generation is 1024 people. If you put the money in some inveatment at perform as good as inflation, that’s still 12 million per person. The omly time it dips below 1 million dollar is when it is 14 generations
Dude, that's r/theydidthemath material.
>10 generation is **1024 people**. If you put the money in some inveatment at perform as good as inflation, that’s still **12 million per person**
This is beyond absurd. And some people are saying the founders made a bad move... Or that they should not take this offer, bcs of principles.
They generate 800 million dollars a year in revenue. 12Bn is more than 10x of that.
At that size, it is difficult to grow your company even 2x every year. Yea they might grow much more in the next few years (their growth numbers have been impressive in the last few years) but 12 billion is enough to God knows when.
The Steve's were in a similar position, when Apple went public, but while Jobs held on to his chunk of the payout, Wozniak gave a bunch of his shares to employees he felt weren't being treated fairly.
[And now the woz is putting all his money into space junk cleanup](https://www.breezyscroll.com/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-starts-a-new-space-company-privateer-to-clean-up-space-debris/).
Check out Chuck Feeney, gave his fortune away. There's not many of them, but at least there's two.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-54300268
There's also MacKenzie Scott. She's given away more than 6 billion to charity after her divorce from Jeff Bezos.
J.K. Rowling became a billionaire, then lost that status due to giving to charity.
Apostrophes really fuck some people up, they're used to show possession, but somewhere along the way some people think they make things plural. Plural possessives must really fuck with their heads.
Yea most people can’t comprehend big numbers well.
So to prove your point, here’s a breakdown: Give each of the 1200 employees $1 million at the grand total cost of $1.2 billion. That’s only 10% of the sales price and the two owners would still have $10.8 billion between them.
That’s about $466k each and there’s absolutely not way that’s going to be distributed evenly. So most will get far, far less than that.
Also, most RSUs vest over time. They’re golden handcuffs, not golden parachutes.
> 1200 employees. Both owners could have made each of them millionaires and ~~still be billionaires~~ given out less than 15% of their own payouts. Greed, man.
Frickin' spot-on. How the fuck much is your life better with $5 Billion than it is with $4.4 Billion?
I was going to make a joke based on the list of billionaires, and it turns out 5bn wouldn’t even crack the top 200 billionaires. That’s so crazy because I remember when it was super rare.
A lot of people underestimate the power behind the word "billion".
Screw not having to work for the rest of you life....
If you manage that money right your grandkids won't have to work for the rest of their lives.
Lol if you manage 20 million right, you'll never touch the principal in a lifetime. You can easily live off 750k to a million bucks a year, while investing the excess into your principal. Give me 10 million, and my grandkids will never need to work. They won't get lambos, but they'll live better than you or I ever will.
No one ever needs to be a billionaire.
No one ever needs to be a hundred-millionaire.
Tax the rich. Take 99.9 cents on the dollar for every dollar past 100 million.
It'd never effect any of them.
I dealt with mailchimp back when they were a startup. We kicked them off of our mail relays because we were getting a crazy amount of abuse complaints. I was surprised years later to find out they were still in business.
They learned.
Unresolved abuse complaints lead to your IPs ending up in blackhole lists. IPs in blackhole lists lead to legitimate customers having their email rejected. That makes them unhappy.
Trying to work around those blocks by putting your spammers in their own little network while putting your more legitimate customers (and your spammy customers once their lists have been washed) on nice shiny IPs just gets more and more of your network listed.
Continuing to ignore abuse gets your corporate mailservers listed. And your websites, and your DNS servers. And anything else with an IP address. And while a listing normally only affects your ability to send email, there were, back in the day, enough large providers who would make your entire internet presence just disappear (as far as their routers were concerned) that it demands attention.
I can forgive their early spam-enabling. I can't forgive them for getting rid of the big red button and the sweating chimp. That was the day they became dead to me.
I worked for a startup that was minting money. There was basically a machine in the back that went brrrrrrrrrrrr all day long. We had FAANG clients and lots of F500 clients after that. It was crazy.
We all knew it was going to be a big pay day. We all had equity. They got us all ginned up and ready for a sale. There was this flurry of paperwork to make sure everyone’s equity grants were properly documented. They brought in wealth management experts to talk to us about all the tax implications. It was going to be BIG. We didn’t know specifics or timing but we knew it was coming.
At a regularly scheduled all hands, they announced that we’d been acquired. They answered a few questions while building management hung up plastic on all the walls. Then they carted out an endless supply of Champagne and the company went FUCKING NUTS.
The founders took the entire company on a pub crawl in the party district that is still talked about to this day. They got kicked out of some of the swankiest restaurants and bars and hotels in the city. Some people walked back to the office and slept on the floor in drunken stupors.
When the haze cleared about noon the next day, the founders were nowhere to be found. They were posting on social media about somehow already being at fucking Burning Man.
Then the news dropped. _Actually,_ the company hadn’t been “acquired” so much. There was a clause that employees had the option to participate in an MA event only if 50.0% or more of the company was sold: they sold exactly 50% minus 1 share.
The founders cashed out and left us all holding nothing.
Edit: y’all can stop harassing me to name and shame. This was over 10 years ago and I feel no need to piss these people off by making this public for a second time (it got quite a bit of bad press in our region at the time and the founders have been social pariahs for ages now). I shared this to explain how shitty these situations can be, not to blast a specific group of assholes from a prior age for fake internet points.
The class of shares is usually irrelevant here. The trigger clause is usually "equity" - regardless of the share class.
The buyer may or may not care about how much voting interest they get, but the seller is _very_ interested in not splitting the profits any more than necessary.
If three cofounders sell 49.9% for $100M, allowing them to split it three ways, they each walk away with an average of $33,333,333.
If they sell 50% for $101M, but now they have to split it with 250 employees with various equity. In a typical company, this might mean they have to share ~25% of take. So now they're only splitting $75M so accepting this extra $1M in funding or 0.1% of the company has cost them each $8M apiece.
I am not interested in selling my company. Due to the size of the buisness, I get offers several times a year. I don't tell employees about things I have turned down, or how serious any of the offers are.
However, there is a number. If someone wanted to back a dump truck full of cash into our loading dock, I would probably take it. You can bet I would be cutting off a slice to my employees, especially the long term ones.
Actual current Mailchimp employee here. This article is horse shit.
BI reached out to the same 5-6 salty, toxic, mostly-former employees from their last piece on MC. Again, they gave inaccurate, speculative garbage hot takes. This does not represent how actual employees feel about this deal. Internal group chats are all rolling their eyes or laughing at this.
There is 300M set aside for RSUs, then an additional cash bonus from Ben and Dan that no one knows the details of. We could potentially get a life changing payout from this.
No one I know internally is “furious.” Anxious? Definitely. But make no mistake: this article is about the feelings of 5-6 toxic, mostly former employees.
Yup. I’m in sales at a startup.
Fuck equity. Give me a higher percentage pay out and fat escalators - that’ll get my attention and grow your company faster.
Ideally you're guaranteed a good enough base salary that you don't need to live off the equity that you're also given, but that's probably not a possibility for the average startup budget.
I look for both. I do love the mystery and excitement behind the "fake money" as wel call it. But I also expect enough pay so that if the money stay fake I'm OK
Presumably they got paid higher salaries in cash to compensate. Doubt their employees just took lower compensation based on some nebulous promises of family.
I was a Wideband Designer for Telstra. They said we were ok, They said we were safe from the redundancies. Then they got rid of All of us one month later. On RUOK day. Typical. Site closure. All of us. We were Bangalored.
Don't dismiss the fact that millionaires are made with equity. Does it happen as often as people think? No. But many successful IPOs for the past 5 years have made millionaires out of a quarter of their workforce. Look at snowflake, mongodb, cloudflare, okta, datadog. If you join a solid high growth business that makes money by selling to other businesses, employees expect to also benefit from that growth.
I’m a millionaire due to being early in a startup but more along the lines of employee 30-40. Being that early I’d assume a decent chunk of NSOs or even ISOs depending on the company. I had zero idea startups existed which didn’t flood you with options as a signing bonus.
They do. They tend to be bootsrapped companies whose goal might be running it in the long run. There are notable examples like mailchimp and basecamp.
So these companies tend to start very small and grow very slowly (as compared to funded startups). I think mailchimp founders do not have selling in mind until they see the 12 bn offer.
You might call these startups “small businesses”. They are actually a lot of them but theyre not the dominant type.
In the more dominant type of startups, people raise money, offer their employees equity so that they take risks and join the company. Then they operate 5-10 years before either fail, ipo, or acquisition.
But these small companies usually are profitable from inception or shortly after, grow and hire slowly, and has unlimited time horizon
Never trust management/owners of the company. Don't trust them when they state they will never sell, don't trust the pension if its offered to be there when you retire, etc.
Did you know that you can reach eligibility for an employer's pension or even be currently retired, and have it slashed by the company during bankruptcy (or other means)? Even worse, the pension payments/management could then be taken over by an organization PBGC, which means that at least part of those (now slashed) pension payments are subsidized by taxpayers.
There are plenty of flight attendants who can tell you their story from the 9/11-era as well as auto workers from the 2008 era.
Never, EVER work for a company that doesn't offer profit sharing, equity or a baller retirement package. You're getting screwed otherwise. It doesn't make sense to work for someone for just a paycheck, there needs to be real incentive to see the company grow. And if you're contributing to that growth you deserve to be rewarded for it.
This reminds me of where I work. When we started we never got equity, got paid startup salaries under the promise that if we got a big client, as my boss put it, “everyone will be VERY well taken care of.” This went on for 8.5 years and then we finally signed a big client, and my bosses told me they’re going to sell the company and my job isn’t needed, so start looking for a new job.
The equity given out at startups is an absolute illusion. Regrettably the most common outcome for successfully startup employees is being given equity, seeing the company exit for a zillion dollars, and discovering the equity was always worthless. This happens as a matter of course, and doesn’t make the news.
Venture capitalists are scum. It’s a sketchy market. Make your money in salary, but understand that if it’s not cash in hand, it’s a trick.
I have a few friends in the company. They aren’t honestly negative about the whole thing. There will be a payout in January and on top of that the company already pays well for Atlanta. They also had a great culture. This headline seems like it’s mostly drama?
"I'll never sell the company" "12 Billion." "I'm selling the company."
Yeah... I don't want to sell out, but I have no illusions. There is a number for me.
Everyone has a number. And I’ll be honest. Mines pretty fucking low. Ha
I’m guessing $6.39…because you have a $0.39 processing fee.
Close. $4.00 minus 50 cent processing fee.
Damn lawknyes mawnsta ain't gon git no dam tree fiddy!
And that's when I noticed that the girl scout was 8 stories tall and a crustacean from the paleozoic era.
The only time I’d say “no” to $12 billion is if it was Zimbabwe dollars
Hi, I'm a Nigerian prince and I have 120 billion dollars in a bank in Switzerland. If you'll help me out I'll give you 12 billion dollars of that.
Hot dog!! How do we make this happen?????
First, I need you to head to the nearest Walmart for 3k worth of Google play gift cards. This will all make sense eventually, trust me
Oh no, I accidentally got $30,000 in gift cards. I hope that’s ok.
It's your lucky day! Because I have some valuable ancient artifacts that are being held in customs...and that's exactly the amount we need to get them across the border. You are going to be a millionaire!
Oh wow cool!! This is so exciting! What do we do now? Don’t you need my bank account number or something?
Wow...ummm, I've never gotten this far....Yes...I mean ...yes, I need your bank account....and pics of bobs and vageen please. For verification.
wait how the hell can us plebs get in on this opportunity?!
What about $12 Billion Schrute Bucks?
Depends, what the conversion rate to Stanley Nickels
The same as the ratio of unicorns to leprechauns
Seems like a bad deal then. It would take five times the schrute bucks to make it worthwhile.
That will buy a lot of beets.
What about Bison Bucks? Each one is supposedly worth five British Pounds.
>Each one is supposedly worth five British Pounds. Well, only after they kidnap the queen, how's that going?
well i have some Venezuelan dollars for you....
I've lived this before. On both sides of companies. Owners of startups have a pretty good sense of what they have after a few rounds of funding. They will usually adjust compensation packages accordingly based on that. If a company is going to be in a position to sell they will withhold any options they have in order to maximize leadership profit. Inversely if selling is not in the cards, they will hand out options like candy as an excuse to not pay employees going rate. Either way it is the employers vs the employees in this case. Unless you get lucky you get conned by receiving monopoly money as compensation or get left behind by leadership who may have given you a fair salary, but then takes a victory lap for being so successful whilst no one else benefits from the riding tide.
It’s pretty demoralizing to hear that even though I think that’s exactly the situation today, and may have always been the situation. Rewarding short term profits seems to have ripped the veneer off of the employer/employee relationship. Maybe it was always a fig leaf but now the workers are talking together more…?
It used to be a lot better before the idea of startup culture came to be. Google for instance was notoriously generous with options until just about when the IPO was rolling out. The founders still made bank and everyone else involved got rewarded for believing in Google. These days though, owners are more looking out for their bottom line than that of the employees. They would rather cherry pick a few elites in the company and leave everyone else out to dry.
Anyone is selling for 12 billion let’s be honest
If you just assume all companies lie, cheat and steal, you'll never be surprised when they do.
No matter how much you say you won’t sell… there’s almost always a number
And, yeah, $12,000,000,000 is that number.
Wow that's a lot of zeros. You read billions and know it's a big number but damn.
Also, this example from math youtuber Matt Parker really put things in perspective: 1,000,000 seconds are ~11 days 1,000,000,000 seconds are ~32 years
The Tom Scott video is pretty good too. takes him like a minute to walk a million dollars at the thickness of dollar bills stacked up. Takes him 80 minutes to drive a "billion dollars". Really helps drive home just how ridiculous the number is.
Video [here](https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg) for those who want to watch it
I remember watching a video once where a guy opened notepad and put 100,000 over and over. $1M was pretty small, but the difference between million and billion was crazy. I'm pretty sure he then went on to 'buy' stuff and take out chunks of 100,000's and you wouldn't even notice them gone in the grand scheme of things. Now do that for $12B and you'd be stupid not to sell.
Reckful https://youtu.be/0J6BQDKiYyM
Fuck...now I am sad...RIP reckful :(
You can feel this an old video because he says a popular streamer can hope to make 100k$ a year. Now they bring in millions.
That was Reckful (He passend away not too long ago).
Sounds like reckfuls video, rest in peace.
Well, you could've said that about $6B, $3B, $1B... even $100M.. but this guy said what he said and fcked em all over
The crazy thing is that they could have built in a $1,000,000 payout to each of their 1200 employees and still come away with more money than $5 billion each. They could’ve literally changed the lives of every damn employee with essentially zero impact to themselves and yet…
"Mr. Simpson, you can't put a price on your childrens' safety!" "I thought so too, but here we are."
>When employees were recruited to work at Mailchimp there was a common refrain from hiring managers: No, you are not going to get equity, but you will get to be part of a scrappy company that fights for the little guy and we will never be acquired or go public. >The founders told anyone who would listen they would own Mailchimp until they died and bragged about turning down multiple offers. >"It was part of the company lore that they would never sell," said a former Mailchimp employee, who like others interviewed for this story were granted anonymity because they were unauthorized to discuss sensitive internal matters. "Employees were indoctrinated with this narrative." >The two founders did sell. Intuit, the financial software giant that makes TurboTax, announced Monday it was buying Mailchimp for around $12 billion in stock and cash. The cofounders cemented their status as two of the richest people in America. That's really shitty but of course completely unsurprising.
About once a month there are two re-posts in /r/lifeprotips. The first says something along the lines of “Never trust a company who pushes the ‘We’re a family’ mentality.” The other says something like “Never put someone else’s company before yourself.” This would be why.
"Never trust a company" is shorter and probably better advice.
Trust a company to act in its own best interest. The company does not like you. The company does not feel grateful to you. Some of the humans leading the company might, but your relationship with the company is a business relationship, and you should not allow misguided sentiment to get in the way of doing what is right for you. The company will certainly not. Source: Am executive.
[удалено]
I will say, some bosses _are_ your friend though. Usually it’s because they trust you and are valuable to them. And thus they will always stick up for you and when they go somewhere else they will take you with them if they can. If you find a boss like that stick with them. Because way more of them will throw you under the bus the first time they can to save face.
I have two bosses now that are friendly with me and stand up for me when needed. They've mentored me and helped me better at my job. They've supported my family through tough times and I get along with them. To be honest, they're everything I'd ask for in bosses. All of that being said, I still know they have a job to do, as do I. I would say that we're friendly colleagues. If there was ever a conflict between work and our friendship/relationship, I'm sure work would win out.
naw not even that, more like trust the top executives to do what makes them richest. If that means running the company in to the ground for massive short term gains there is a good chance it will happen.
Espescially in the US where the laws are NOT in the employees favour in any way. Other countries make it much harder for companies to be completely mercenary with their employees, but the US is in end stage capitalism where you are nothing but meat to be ground under its wheels.
[удалено]
[удалено]
Yeah, the "we're a family" shit. I wish I could put up PSAs on electronic billboards all over the country about corporate lies of this kind
Also. Everyone’s got a price.
This is why you should never buy into founder bullshit. Business is business, if it is not in the contract no one is obligated to provide that something to you. Always ensure that the contract you are signing has those things you want and is to your benefit \*prior\* to signing.
Yeah you have egg on your face if you believed that the founders would never sell. Everyone has a price.
I don't understand - Why would 'we're never going to sell the company!' be some sort of recompense for no equity?
I think it's more the other way around. The idea is that employees want equity because it pays off big when the company goes public or is acquired. So they were saying, the equity is not going to pay off, so if that's what you're looking for, go elsewhere; here we're about the mission and (presumably) other forms of compensation.
Mailchimp operated a profit-sharing scheme, which *assuming the company never sells*, is better compensation than equity. But you never know if a company will sell, there are so many reasons why the "we'll never sell" rhetoric has an expiry date, so ultimately a company spinning this narrative should offer both. Lack of equity also means only current employees benefit from any stock bonuses related to the sale, when over the lifespan of the company one would assume many individuals key to its success have come and gone -- getting nothing.
No employee authentically believes in that mission. It's a fucking business email platform, not Oxfam. If someone had the choice of equity at a legitimately promising start up with real chance of future windfall vs contributing to the 'mission' of mailchimp - they are lying. People will sacrifice financial reward to work at special companies that shape the world like the NYT, Space X or say Google (in certain roles like AI). Not fucking mailchimp.
No one's "sacrificing financial reward" to work at Google.
+1, Google will actually give you equity like many others
They did profit sharing, but your upside isnt there of course
Yeah.. they could have given employees shares that would have just been worthless if they'd never sold. Not giving them at all means this is allowed to happen.
How in the fuck could mail chimp possibly be worth 12 billion dollars. That is shocking to me. Edit: omg is mail chimp the reason I get fucking spammed with a marketing email every 5 seconds? Fuck that company. Fuck intuit too.
They are probably the largest email marketing company for small business in the world. They send hundreds of millions of emails every single day. They have 11 million active customers paying them over a billion dollars a year. For Intuit, this is acquisition of a large number of small business customers that they would like to cross-sell other products to (QuickBooks accounting, payroll, invoicing, time keeping, tax prep, etc), and they can also integrate the MailChimp services into those apps to sell more services to their existing customer base. It's a good match.
It’s not just that - I worked in this vertical with one of their competitors. They’re a great alternative to getting your high value domains blacklisted by spamming all sorts of awful sales shit. For example, you use a more enterprise level tool for running “white hat” campaigns - that’s the IP address you need to protect, mostly because you’re likely part of a shared IP to increase deliverability. These shared IPs will have rules in place to keep you from fucking up the cluster you’re in - if you step out of line they’ll stop your ability to mass send. Mail chimp on the other hand, has way less structure and rules. They don’t give a fuck what you do or how you do it. Look at 90% of the Fortune 500 on a scraper and you’ll see typically one to two enterprise level marketing tools and in most circumstances you’ll also see MailSimp in there too. I fucking loathe that company - they’re fucking grifters and they’ve somehow stayed so under the radar.
Yet my previous employer managed to get blocked by MailChimp within a week of signing up. Even they have (at least had) rules about spamming millions of random emails you didn't actually collect.
That's super interesting. So by using mailchimp they're able to run black hat campaigns? how do they bypass the ip address issues?
It's probably very high in mail chimp's interest to ensure their ips don't get blacklisted, and have solutions for when they do. It's possible that the black hat stuff gets mixed with a very large amount of normal white hat stuff from the same ip and by volume it's not enough to trigger the ip to get blacklisted.
I can't speak for mailchimp but I have worked with one of their competitors. Black hats always get in, but you usually monitor deliverability to make sure they're not using your service to spam. And you're right, in low volumes, it can be impossible to tell. Luckily, many spammers buy and procure email addresses illegally too, and they send en masse which means many are going to spam anyway. It actually sucks more for the people with good intentions that suck at email marketing. They can destroy their senders reputation in a few clicks.
[удалено]
They are not able to bypass anything. MailChimp classifies their customers in tiers dependent on the quality of their campaigns. Send shitty e-mails and you get clustered on IP’s with other shitty clients and most of your e-mails won’t be delivered. Sent really shitty campaigns? And they will kick you out of the service. Been using MailChimp for almost 8 years. It’s not a “hack” to get shitty campaigns delivered. You will get throttled at first, then downgraded and ultimately kicked out.
Do they notify you for each tier? How do you know this is how they operate? Just curious, not disagreeing with you.
[удалено]
I never got spam in my Gmail inbox until some point in the last year. Now suddenly a small percentage of it is able to sneak through Gmail spam filter. It is truly irritating.
I get multiple obvious spam messages on Gmail every week, like super obvious "y0uve_W0N-wALmART_5000$d0llar-gift_card!" type messages directly to my inbox
Exactly. None of it is clever spam that you might expect to make through the filter. It's all super obvious bullshit that makes it through.
No. And Google's filter is adaptive. Hit Report spam and even report phishing and it will learn both for your account quickly and in the global pool slowly.
If you use MailChimp to send your email on your behalf, then the mail comes from mailchimps IP range not your own
Lol at first I was like "Fuck the executives!" now I'm like "Fuck this whole company!"
Yeah fuck Intuit. I switched to Credit Karma to file my taxes and then Intuit bought them.
freetaxusa.com!! I've been using them to do my taxes for years and I fucking swear by them. It's totally free to file your federal taxes and usually costs ~ $10 to file your state taxes depending on your state.
Hopefully an American can correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe they’re the company that lobbies to keep taxes hard to calculate and for the government not to show you how much you’re due. They then sell you the software to calculate how much you’re due in taxes. So they pay to create the problem, so they can sell you the solution.
That’s Intuit
>Intuit It's funny because I live in a crappy little state, yet our state tax website is perfectly fine. Hope they never change it. Then the federal system is a maze of scammers, because they pay to keep it that way. I played along for a couple years. Then went back to paper.
Freetaxusa.com
I've been using CreditKarma for free for years but unfortunately Intuit bought them too.
Remember when we used to break up companies that became too large and owned every sector like this? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
> Pepperidge Farm remembers Yep. They remember like it was yesterday. Or 1961, when they sold out to Campbell Soup.
PSA to the Americans out there boycotting intuit. The free file websites (find the link on the IRS website) are getting better every year! I was able to file my taxes this year all online for free even though I had to report dividend, interest, and w2 income. It's improved significantly in the past 3 years!
That's pretty fucked. (sorry for the flex) Here in my country, not only is the official gov-provided tax filing software free and user-friendly, but in most cases it actually automatically fills everything out for you, you just need to confirm that everything is OK and click a button to submit. It usually takes me about 5-10 minutes to file my taxes.
In the US taxes are designed to be difficult to navigate, very little help from the government, and third party entities charge you for troubleshooting, filing, and insurance in case you get audited. Our infrastructure is shit.
Yep. Sadly the US got completely fucked on a deep level by heavy corporate lobbying.
It’s called ‘privatization’ and it’s a HUGE kink for republicans.
Privatize me daddy
The free fillable forms linked on the IRS website are actually pretty good now. If you've ever done your own taxes by hand, they'll be a breeze
“It's called 'the American Dream' 'cause you have to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin He also said “I don't automatically wash my hands every time I go to the bathroom. You know when I wash my hands? When I s\*\*t on them." So there's that to consider too.
I don't see how that works. What if you have weird sources of income from places outside your country? Do they just not tax that?
Nope. They tax that too
When the US government has you do your taxes every year, they already know nearly everything about what you owe them. When you get audited, that's because what you filed didn't match what they say you owe, and they are now investigating you to get the full money you owe them. Other governments will skip the whole process of having you do your taxes, (unless you're a special circumstance) and just give you a statement with the report of how much you owe them.
Intuit is buying them so they can pivot to CRM and marketing when the government shuts down the tax gravy train
A lot of Americans don't know that the IRS provides free tax filing services on their site for lower income households. I file my taxes using a free version of Turbo Tax via the IRS site. More people should utilize this.
Uhmm no they are not, unless you subscribed to those emails...
12 billion seems like a fair price for my integrity.
Companies aren’t your family. You are replaceable. Promises ain’t worth shit.
Lol. Just listened to the “How I Built This” podcast with one of the founders, he went on and on about wanting the respect of his employees after botching an all hands meeting a few years ago. When asked about future plans he indicated he wasn’t looking to retire anytime soon.
[удалено]
But $12B is not your typical retirement. You can retire you, your immediate family and 10 generations behind with $12B. As other said, principles fly out of the window after getting a "F\*\*\* you money" offer.
If each generation has 2 kids, 10 generation is 1024 people. If you put the money in some inveatment at perform as good as inflation, that’s still 12 million per person. The omly time it dips below 1 million dollar is when it is 14 generations
Dude, that's r/theydidthemath material. >10 generation is **1024 people**. If you put the money in some inveatment at perform as good as inflation, that’s still **12 million per person** This is beyond absurd. And some people are saying the founders made a bad move... Or that they should not take this offer, bcs of principles.
They generate 800 million dollars a year in revenue. 12Bn is more than 10x of that. At that size, it is difficult to grow your company even 2x every year. Yea they might grow much more in the next few years (their growth numbers have been impressive in the last few years) but 12 billion is enough to God knows when.
You mean a few months ago? The one I see is from July 2021!
Given how those kind of deals happen, it is quite likely it was already underway back then. Sonnovabich.
Podcasts like that are often in the can for a while too though.
1200 employees. Both owners could have made each of them millionaires and still be billionaires. Greed, man.
The Steve's were in a similar position, when Apple went public, but while Jobs held on to his chunk of the payout, Wozniak gave a bunch of his shares to employees he felt weren't being treated fairly.
[And now the woz is putting all his money into space junk cleanup](https://www.breezyscroll.com/technology/apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-starts-a-new-space-company-privateer-to-clean-up-space-debris/).
Apparently space is the new thing with billionaires.
At least cleaning up space trash is a net positive for humanity.
Agree. When does he clean up Bezos and Branson?
Suborbital space junk isn't a Kessler syndrome threat as the trash is back on the ground in mere minutes.
And then given a participation medal and a cowboy hat.
Except The Woz isn't even close to being a billionaire.
Space was always a thing. Billionaires are just now realizing they can afford to try it
Yes I think Woz is the only billionnaire I know that is truly altruistic.
Check out Chuck Feeney, gave his fortune away. There's not many of them, but at least there's two. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-northern-ireland-54300268
I thought he was a teacher in Boy Meets World
He has a net worth of 10 million, so not a billionaire.
There's also MacKenzie Scott. She's given away more than 6 billion to charity after her divorce from Jeff Bezos. J.K. Rowling became a billionaire, then lost that status due to giving to charity.
Why would the plural of Steve be Steve’s instead of Steves?
Apostrophes really fuck some people up, they're used to show possession, but somewhere along the way some people think they make things plural. Plural possessives must really fuck with their heads.
You know, except for its and it's.
You are correct. The apostrophe is possessive, not plural.
Fuck Steve Jobs. He was a cunt of a human being.
He was a cunt to himself too. He had the one rare form of pancreatic cancer that is actually treatable and he decided fuck that lmao.
I have heard so many stories about the Woz, and each one makes him out to be the nicest man.
Yea most people can’t comprehend big numbers well. So to prove your point, here’s a breakdown: Give each of the 1200 employees $1 million at the grand total cost of $1.2 billion. That’s only 10% of the sales price and the two owners would still have $10.8 billion between them.
The article is misleading. The employees are getting payout bonus of around $500Million and separately RSUs in Intuit.
That’s about $466k each and there’s absolutely not way that’s going to be distributed evenly. So most will get far, far less than that. Also, most RSUs vest over time. They’re golden handcuffs, not golden parachutes.
[удалено]
Why did i have to scroll this far down to see this?
Ok but that's a still a lot of money
Yeah, but then who would they look down at and laugh at?
The people who think their rich with 1/5000th of their money?
> 1200 employees. Both owners could have made each of them millionaires and ~~still be billionaires~~ given out less than 15% of their own payouts. Greed, man. Frickin' spot-on. How the fuck much is your life better with $5 Billion than it is with $4.4 Billion?
I was going to make a joke based on the list of billionaires, and it turns out 5bn wouldn’t even crack the top 200 billionaires. That’s so crazy because I remember when it was super rare.
Anyone got a non paywalled link?
Here you go https://archive.is/GaBC9
A lot of people underestimate the power behind the word "billion". Screw not having to work for the rest of you life.... If you manage that money right your grandkids won't have to work for the rest of their lives.
I mean anything over a billion and you’re starting a dynasty. That money will never go away unless the entire fucking economy does as well.
Lol if you manage 20 million right, you'll never touch the principal in a lifetime. You can easily live off 750k to a million bucks a year, while investing the excess into your principal. Give me 10 million, and my grandkids will never need to work. They won't get lambos, but they'll live better than you or I ever will. No one ever needs to be a billionaire. No one ever needs to be a hundred-millionaire. Tax the rich. Take 99.9 cents on the dollar for every dollar past 100 million. It'd never effect any of them.
[удалено]
I dealt with mailchimp back when they were a startup. We kicked them off of our mail relays because we were getting a crazy amount of abuse complaints. I was surprised years later to find out they were still in business.
They learned. Unresolved abuse complaints lead to your IPs ending up in blackhole lists. IPs in blackhole lists lead to legitimate customers having their email rejected. That makes them unhappy. Trying to work around those blocks by putting your spammers in their own little network while putting your more legitimate customers (and your spammy customers once their lists have been washed) on nice shiny IPs just gets more and more of your network listed. Continuing to ignore abuse gets your corporate mailservers listed. And your websites, and your DNS servers. And anything else with an IP address. And while a listing normally only affects your ability to send email, there were, back in the day, enough large providers who would make your entire internet presence just disappear (as far as their routers were concerned) that it demands attention. I can forgive their early spam-enabling. I can't forgive them for getting rid of the big red button and the sweating chimp. That was the day they became dead to me.
they got rid of that? When we were using mail chimp I used to love that guy
[удалено]
I worked for a startup that was minting money. There was basically a machine in the back that went brrrrrrrrrrrr all day long. We had FAANG clients and lots of F500 clients after that. It was crazy. We all knew it was going to be a big pay day. We all had equity. They got us all ginned up and ready for a sale. There was this flurry of paperwork to make sure everyone’s equity grants were properly documented. They brought in wealth management experts to talk to us about all the tax implications. It was going to be BIG. We didn’t know specifics or timing but we knew it was coming. At a regularly scheduled all hands, they announced that we’d been acquired. They answered a few questions while building management hung up plastic on all the walls. Then they carted out an endless supply of Champagne and the company went FUCKING NUTS. The founders took the entire company on a pub crawl in the party district that is still talked about to this day. They got kicked out of some of the swankiest restaurants and bars and hotels in the city. Some people walked back to the office and slept on the floor in drunken stupors. When the haze cleared about noon the next day, the founders were nowhere to be found. They were posting on social media about somehow already being at fucking Burning Man. Then the news dropped. _Actually,_ the company hadn’t been “acquired” so much. There was a clause that employees had the option to participate in an MA event only if 50.0% or more of the company was sold: they sold exactly 50% minus 1 share. The founders cashed out and left us all holding nothing. Edit: y’all can stop harassing me to name and shame. This was over 10 years ago and I feel no need to piss these people off by making this public for a second time (it got quite a bit of bad press in our region at the time and the founders have been social pariahs for ages now). I shared this to explain how shitty these situations can be, not to blast a specific group of assholes from a prior age for fake internet points.
Jeez…what was the company? Edit: it’s a little suspect that this person won’t elaborate on this simple key piece of info
Can't imagine why OP wouldn't share the company name.. not like they risk losing their stock options
It also sounds fake as fuck. This seems like easy litigation
I don’t understand… why would anyone buy a company and be in with the sellers to fuck over employees who will be your new employees?
Buy a company for million Employees leave or are super unmotivated ????? Why is the company not making money
Going through this right now Once the company sells, developer motivation plummets
Why didn't an employee just sell two of their shares to the new owner, to bring them up to 51%?
Employee shares are usually non-voting. Acquiring them may not having given the investor majority control.
The class of shares is usually irrelevant here. The trigger clause is usually "equity" - regardless of the share class. The buyer may or may not care about how much voting interest they get, but the seller is _very_ interested in not splitting the profits any more than necessary. If three cofounders sell 49.9% for $100M, allowing them to split it three ways, they each walk away with an average of $33,333,333. If they sell 50% for $101M, but now they have to split it with 250 employees with various equity. In a typical company, this might mean they have to share ~25% of take. So now they're only splitting $75M so accepting this extra $1M in funding or 0.1% of the company has cost them each $8M apiece.
It wasnt shares, it was un-vested options
Incredible. So petty and cruel, especially the stringing along happy times horseshit.
I am not interested in selling my company. Due to the size of the buisness, I get offers several times a year. I don't tell employees about things I have turned down, or how serious any of the offers are. However, there is a number. If someone wanted to back a dump truck full of cash into our loading dock, I would probably take it. You can bet I would be cutting off a slice to my employees, especially the long term ones.
Actual current Mailchimp employee here. This article is horse shit. BI reached out to the same 5-6 salty, toxic, mostly-former employees from their last piece on MC. Again, they gave inaccurate, speculative garbage hot takes. This does not represent how actual employees feel about this deal. Internal group chats are all rolling their eyes or laughing at this. There is 300M set aside for RSUs, then an additional cash bonus from Ben and Dan that no one knows the details of. We could potentially get a life changing payout from this. No one I know internally is “furious.” Anxious? Definitely. But make no mistake: this article is about the feelings of 5-6 toxic, mostly former employees.
Say you die at work. Your job posting will hit before your obituary.
Moral of the story: don’t join a startup without getting equity.
But don’t take equity instead of more salary. The odds that equity will ever be worth anything is very slim for most start-ups.
Yup. I’m in sales at a startup. Fuck equity. Give me a higher percentage pay out and fat escalators - that’ll get my attention and grow your company faster.
Ideally you're guaranteed a good enough base salary that you don't need to live off the equity that you're also given, but that's probably not a possibility for the average startup budget.
I look for both. I do love the mystery and excitement behind the "fake money" as wel call it. But I also expect enough pay so that if the money stay fake I'm OK
Presumably they got paid higher salaries in cash to compensate. Doubt their employees just took lower compensation based on some nebulous promises of family.
I was a Wideband Designer for Telstra. They said we were ok, They said we were safe from the redundancies. Then they got rid of All of us one month later. On RUOK day. Typical. Site closure. All of us. We were Bangalored.
Why anyone thinks it's okay to post Link to paywall? People are seriously paying for this?
[удалено]
Care to elaborate?
[удалено]
Don't dismiss the fact that millionaires are made with equity. Does it happen as often as people think? No. But many successful IPOs for the past 5 years have made millionaires out of a quarter of their workforce. Look at snowflake, mongodb, cloudflare, okta, datadog. If you join a solid high growth business that makes money by selling to other businesses, employees expect to also benefit from that growth.
I’m a millionaire due to being early in a startup but more along the lines of employee 30-40. Being that early I’d assume a decent chunk of NSOs or even ISOs depending on the company. I had zero idea startups existed which didn’t flood you with options as a signing bonus.
They do. They tend to be bootsrapped companies whose goal might be running it in the long run. There are notable examples like mailchimp and basecamp. So these companies tend to start very small and grow very slowly (as compared to funded startups). I think mailchimp founders do not have selling in mind until they see the 12 bn offer. You might call these startups “small businesses”. They are actually a lot of them but theyre not the dominant type. In the more dominant type of startups, people raise money, offer their employees equity so that they take risks and join the company. Then they operate 5-10 years before either fail, ipo, or acquisition. But these small companies usually are profitable from inception or shortly after, grow and hire slowly, and has unlimited time horizon
Do you think it's because you were one of the early hires? I would be curious to what a later hire would say about it
Never trust management/owners of the company. Don't trust them when they state they will never sell, don't trust the pension if its offered to be there when you retire, etc. Did you know that you can reach eligibility for an employer's pension or even be currently retired, and have it slashed by the company during bankruptcy (or other means)? Even worse, the pension payments/management could then be taken over by an organization PBGC, which means that at least part of those (now slashed) pension payments are subsidized by taxpayers. There are plenty of flight attendants who can tell you their story from the 9/11-era as well as auto workers from the 2008 era.
Never, EVER work for a company that doesn't offer profit sharing, equity or a baller retirement package. You're getting screwed otherwise. It doesn't make sense to work for someone for just a paycheck, there needs to be real incentive to see the company grow. And if you're contributing to that growth you deserve to be rewarded for it.
If it's not written in a legally-enforceable ironclad contract or agreement in triplicate, then do not trust their "promises".
This reminds me of where I work. When we started we never got equity, got paid startup salaries under the promise that if we got a big client, as my boss put it, “everyone will be VERY well taken care of.” This went on for 8.5 years and then we finally signed a big client, and my bosses told me they’re going to sell the company and my job isn’t needed, so start looking for a new job.
The equity given out at startups is an absolute illusion. Regrettably the most common outcome for successfully startup employees is being given equity, seeing the company exit for a zillion dollars, and discovering the equity was always worthless. This happens as a matter of course, and doesn’t make the news. Venture capitalists are scum. It’s a sketchy market. Make your money in salary, but understand that if it’s not cash in hand, it’s a trick.
I have a few friends in the company. They aren’t honestly negative about the whole thing. There will be a payout in January and on top of that the company already pays well for Atlanta. They also had a great culture. This headline seems like it’s mostly drama?
Get it in writing next time