But it's OK. It was very naive to say 'never' and it was a bit naive to take it at face value. As long as they paid their employees well and treated them with respect, and were clear of their prospects, I fail to see who is hurt here ? Except customers being now under the Intuit umbrella, that must hurt...

In the end what changed is that e-mail based marketing was on the decline, with other mediums taking over. There's a point where an industry that stops growing fast eventually consolidates and it tends to get absorbed by groups that has other revenue streams.

FWIW this is completely incorrect. Over the past 2 years other marketing channels have skyrocketed in cost (eg FB ads) and most brands/companies are now investing heavily into email marketing. It's a significant growth industry right now, more so than at any time since I've been involved with email marketing (since ~2010).

At first I thought it was just phishers trying something new, but when I looked where the mails lead it turned out to be those actual brands.

Yeah, the market valuation went from 10x revenue for a early stage company to 30x revenue for a mature company.

Great for us, as we got almost all of their customers.

I recently heard the story of how that happened. The original founders had no intention of selling out, and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control.

Well, the multinational company offered the ridiculously high price, and the original founders had no chance to make a higher offer. So they lost "their baby", which is now just a pale shadow of what it once was.

The founders got a lot of money of course, so not a sob story.

It seems like there is a pattern of companies buying other companies and that essentially helps the competitors.

It must be disheartening though, to see something you created get run into the ground.

Bust out the idea bin and make something else!

Also to clarify on the seeming heartless I sort of see things as being diluted when others work on them -- in a good way! -- for each person that adds to your thing it goes from mine to our. Long enough and big enough and it's more other people's creativity than yours. Your baby is all grown up and ready to do it's own thing

Our finance-based culture is very destructive to good companies. Whenever a founder sells a company and leaves, the company almost always goes steeply downhill.

> and had signed a deal with the others that unless they were offered a well-defined but ridiculously high price, that the original founders could buy back the shares to take back control.

Yeah some might figure it out, but for me NH isn't Facebook and I'd like to keep it that way.

Definitely not. But just to be sure, you should still make me an offer.

You'd never have to worry that a significant unplanned expense would ruin your life. You come down with a major medical condition and end up with years of major medical expenses? Some drunk driver T-bones you and totals your car? Lose your job and spend a year or two unemployed? House burns down and you still owe the majority of your mortgage? None of those will ever be a concern again if you hold that $100M job for even a year.

Medical expenses -> health insurance

Some drunk driver T-bones you and totals your car -> liability insurance is compulsory

Lose your job and spend a year or two unemployed -> unemployment insurance is compulsory, you get 60 percent of what you made for one year

House burns down and you still owe the majority of your mortgage -> uhg, got us here, we can't afford houses but there is private insurance for that

So even though I pay hefty taxes (or because I do), I still end up much richer than a developer in the US. In theory I don't even need to save up money for retirement, as the general pension fund has me covered (though with the current demographic development I don't fully trust that).

So I probably don't have a good reason to give up my morality of more money. Have been never tempted though.

(for what it's worth, I currently work for a company that makes software offering various kinds of secondary insurance, and I've spent the last few months learning about the kinds of things "cancer insurance" and "accident insurance" are for, and it's been an eye-opener)

And as for your car: yeah, liability insurance is compulsory in the US, but it's really painful to be hit by someone who's illegally uninsured. It actually happened to my mom a few years ago—she got lucky, her insurance was willing to pick up the tab, but she could've been on the hook for a lot of money if her insurance punted instead (to be fair, the damage to her car was entirely cosmetic, and her car was still operable, just with a car-sized dent in it).

In Europe this is covered and very rare currently. After the first four years the car need to pass an official exam each six or twelve months. No insurance means that you can't even start the test nor move the car from there except in a tow truck (paid for you). Driving with the test outdated means a fine and after some months your car can be deregistered automatically. It does not worth the trouble.

I hold no ill will towards undocumented immigrants, but there's not much you can do if someone hits you in an illegal vehicle.

Maybe you wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice humans to Kali, but you might still be okay with working in an open-plan office for two years.

'Offering' other people a life well lived as if that should be my task and not theirs, and justifying things you otherwise wouldn't do has very big problems. Because you can always take it one step further, it never ends really.

Basically, anyone who's got kids is trying (struggling?) to impart this very life lesson: it's easiest to just get your kids what they want, but that's not the best way to raise them.

You can't teach a man to fish if he's dead from starvation.

Mathematically, yes. Practically, so what? 10M is a number that could provide all I could reasonably want for the rest of my life. 10B puts a target on my back, and for what? What does 10B buy me that 10M wouldn't? A life of isolation and extravagance? I can't say that I would turn down the chance to find out, but I'm FI already, and maybe it's lack of imagination but I already have trouble spending my modest discretionary budget as it is.

Heck I'd probably fund a couple tenure positions at a university on the condition that they research certain problems and publish everything to an open access journal. What does a bio lab cost to run, would 10 million a year cover it? That'd be 100 years of funding for 10% of my wealth.

I'd probably follow it up by going to one of my cities troubled youth schools and offering full ride scholarships to everyone who graduates. Figure 100 students a year, 100k scholarship, that's another 10 million a year, so another 10% gone.

Tl;Dr I'm having no problems figuring out how to spend 10 billion!

Somethings that could interest you:

A private island?

A megayacht?

A mansion/penthouse in a ritzy part of LA/NYC (Bezos's LA mansion alone was 1XX MM)?

A professional sports team?

A private jet?

The ability to call the leader of your country and either get through or get a meeting on the books?

Notice that what's interesting about a lot of those isn't just the initial cost, but many of them have quite high carrying costs.

But those are just interesting generalities. At that wealth you can (really have to) get creative. Paul Allen bought a bunch of rock star's guitars and a bunch of Sci Fi memorabilia, and then built a museum to hold them.

Where is that? Are you planning on living in the country? In most large cities, it doesn't seem like 10MM will be enough for you to live in an estate and still not have to work for ongoing regular expenses (food, etc.)

And it's fine you don't want any of those things. Better than fine, that's great. But there are a lot of things that you need more than 10MM for.

A private jet.

You could start a company that builds rockets to go explore Mars.

In other words, you could do something great.

Influence on the global stage

The ability to finance meaningful changes to the world - be they things like disease eradication, political movements, space endeavors. Rather than needing to band together with like-minded individuals and bring a voice to the table, you can outright create or buy a group to enable your vision (within the constraints of physics, and the political overton window)

At 10M, you have, as you say, a modest discretionary budget. Which is to say, it's modest, and not extravagant. The things you can do frivolously while spending $300k/year is different than what you can do while spending $1mm/year, but as you've discovered, unless you get disgustingly ostentatious (I hear the poors only own one car, and drive the same car for longer than a month.), taking care of your creature comforts in a reasonable way isn't that expensive. Eating $400 steak dinner every night for a year is only $150k/yr ("only"). So, other than get ostentatious (what, you don't have multiple houses in multiple states?), what do you do? Change the world.

I mean, congratulations on having joined the two comma club, your little discretionary budget is cute. At 10B, your discretionary budget is probably not actually 1000 times larger, because that's a different game of liquidity, but what you can do without remotely threatening your principal investments is way larger. At 10M, if there was a reason you had to spend $5mm, you'd have to consider it very strongly before doing it. At 10B, you can get $1mm in cash from the bank and light it on fire for the hell of it because you had nothing better to do on a Tuesday night. If there's a movie you want made, you get to ask whomever you want to star in it. You want to have a movie made about your life, starring Nick Cage as you? He's having money problems, so he'll probably say yes.

10B puts you right above Steven Rales, wikipedia article here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_M._Rales. Which is to say, if you want to be a recluse, be a recluse, but 10b puts you in the club of people who have wikipedia articles written about them, despite not being a household name or noteable. Edward Snowden has a wikipedia article, and he's not a billionaire, but he was forced to do some world changey shit to get that. You'd get that simply for having that kind of money. Poke around the Forbes billionaire list - https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/. See how many names you recognize as household names. 10b automatically dumps you in those leagues. Marc Benioff's #240 with an estimated $10b. Now, you may not want to be, but if you're familiar with his work, you can do anything like that, on that level. Own a local sports team. It's a bit different rooting for the local sports team when it's your sports team.

Personally, I'd fund science and research and the arts rather than have anything to do with sports. Affordable healthcare. Buy buildings and give buildings to Planned Parenthood so they don't have to keep moving around (something about protestors makes their neighbors nervous). Fix homelessness (which is a big problem, but I'm sure $10m/yr would help lots of aspects of it). Start a chain of coffee shops and over-employ people so that the people that work there have regular weekly schedules and can go to college.

I hate to say it, but that's really a lack of imagination. Instead of $10M principle with a modest discretionary budget, think of the unreasonable shit you could do with $10m every year. Some of it could even be good for other people.

There's a point where it might make sense for him... even if not for bare personal/lifestyle reasons, a billion could be useful to fund plenty new or existing opensource projects in line with his principles.

I don't know, having billions looks like a liability to me.

I think that's a bias of hindsight, something people say after seeing it happen in a particular situation. In other situations, principles, promises, and other factors have the last word.

Your second point however, “don’t be naive” agree 100%

Oh wait you’re serious. Let me laugh even harder.

Breaking the law for a company is simple a cost of doing business. If that costs too ouch then the lobbying/bribe budget increases to cancel it out m, but most of the time it’s just a line of risk on the balance sheet.

I think a lot of people also have an optimal level of law breakage.

But the big thing that separates your everyday person and companies is that corporations will gladly and willfully break the law, even in cases where they weigh the risk (perhaps they have a legal argument about how it’s not actually breaking the law, but it’s probably paper thin) because it can often be more profitable to commit the crime. and pay whatever fine is imposed than not commit the crime in the first place. It is incredibly rare for anyone to go to jail or be prosecuted individually for corporate crimes, and so the risk to any particular individual is exceedingly low.

I can’t really think of any reasonable example where I could commit a crime as an individual and come out the other side with a net positive, despite being caught/prosecuted.

Corporations aren’t playing with the same deck, and their bad behavior is constantly rewarded. Sure, they can sometimes go over the line and tank the entire operation but that is far and away the exception instead of the rule.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28543096

And even in cases where the managed 100% wants fully comply with existing law, there are still tradeoffs. How much do we fund internal enforcement and will that prevent us from being competitive? Which isn't so much about actively trying to break the law, but willing to risk that breakage will happen, or even naive trust of employees.

It happened to me. The CTO of the company I worked for moved to another company and recruited a bunch of us from his previous job. He made tall promises, none of which worked out. We were annoyed at the time, but I now realize he didn't intentionally mislead us - he was just overly optimistic about his abilities and his own faith in the new company he joined. It was a disaster for everyone he recruited from his previous job.

Everybody has a price, everyone has a breaking point.

I have no idea what compensation over there looked like, but I can’t imagine that it was anything less than stellar.

I’ve always been of the impression that equity is what you hand out when you can’t afford to compensate people enough otherwise. If they are paying well, not handing out equity seems like a perfectly normal move.

You had a 'stake' it was just in terms of other kinds of benefits.

If you join a company after it's well-established, then for the most part, unless it's an 'extremely high growth company' - your stock package isn't going to be worth that much, it's just part of comp.

If you joined MC several years after founding, even if they did give you equity, it would be a bit of a nice bonus, and that is all.

Yes doing the exact opposite of what you have always said tends to do that.

Great, it worked out for you. A friend of mine, recently got an offer from a pre-IPO company. He asked for equity, but they are refusing to share any numbers - saying - their lawyers asked them to not do that. Is it normal?

If the founders take the cash and build, I dunno, the world's biggest yacht, that's a waste. But I think that's incredibly unlikely.

it's an email service provider for campaigns and other email spam with a recognizable brand, let's not imagine that this is beneficial beyond helping companies market stuff to people. It's like a meta-business enhancement service. Happy for the founders, hope they do some good with the new payout - but I think you are giving them a bit too much credit. Sure, kick back 100M to your old school district, maybe another 250M to BLM or to Math for America to strike off all of your philanthropic efforts in one go, curate some plebeian sympathies and smile for the cameras but at the end of the day, making it easy to bombard people with endless email campaigns isn't exactly solving global problems

EDIT: I reject hero worship vigorously - Mailchimp did a thing, it made money, and another entity that did a thing and made money that makes MORE money decided to absorb it and the cash payout was so good that investors/founders of MC decided to say fuck it, I'm done. Take my chips, gimme the loot. 12 billion dollars is generational wealth, but I mean I just can't/won't/don't respect people that have enabled spam or a business model that encourages bombarding people with BS. Same thing with IAP - I don't respect people who work for Apple because there was a layered hierarchy of priorities that said "we want to generate revenue at the expense of the people that trust us with their consumer electronics"

I just intrinsically cannot respect people that decide to profit off of wasting people's time, the only commodity you can't generate more of. Instead of craftsmanship we have psychopathic operators that try to fine tune all the ways to extract money from others and even develop meta-endeavors where people pay others to execute activities to get end-user observers ('users' in modern web dev parlance, for the JS devs) to waste time/spend money, for net negative expected value to themselves and others. It's super sordid and I just can't endorse it. Whatever.

In 25 years these guys will probably pull a Paul Allen and then start funding brain research or something after realizing that all the money in the world can't buy time and more life.

I don't use facebook or instagram or anything anymore, and just solely rely on subscribing to the newsletters of the stuff I like: bands, exhibition spaces, museums, even fashion brands.

Giving out my email tells the almost nothing about myself, except the only valuable thing: I am interested in their services. Most newsletter providers let me opt out with two clicks and I never get any more mails from them.

It really baffles me why there are not more people who enjoy emails, but would rather have another company decide which content they get to see.

This is power, and they market it: Send an email yourself and you may be shut down, send through us and worse case scenario you will have to create a new account to continue.

At the moment their IPs are more bulletproof then their competitors. But that is all they are selling - the ability to push through spam for others.

Every time I use one of their screens to look at some issue I think... There's a bunch of stuff we didn't have to build, all for $80 per month.

And all that other stuff would be a nice package that you would probably be able to buy for $99.

It's the market that https://sendy.co/ is in, but we would have plenty of competition there and better options.

The reason it is only Sendy and a few open source proj's are that SES delivery is not even in the same ballpark as Mailchimp's (I have used both).

And if you want the delivery, you need to pay for Mailchimp or Mailjet anyways. Its the reason you don't save much when sending via the Mailchimp API. The product is not the newsletter builder etc.

Mailchimp is a SaaS, and the value is in the software, just like any SaaS. Specifically the value of email platforms comes from list management, compliance, integrations, branding, etc., all of which are hard to do with the basic-but-reliable email systems we use every day.

None of the ESPs beat our corporate email system on deliverability BTW. They did make it a lot easier to manage email programs, though.

Edit to add, I’m sure IP reputation management is a challenge if your business model is to allow anyone to sign up for free and start sending. Paying clients don’t care about that, though. Deliverability is something you can buy from lots of people. And for small folks, you’re not going to beat the deliverability of Gmail. It’s table stakes IMO. There’s a reason Mailchimp sells itself as a marketing software platform and not “we deliver emails”.

It can, it's just that biologists aren't the ones that are winning the equities and securities game most frequently.

Given their inexperience, they throw money at things blindly, not realizing there are lower hanging fruit than the brain.

A billionaire biologist could attack the problem from first principles. And probably make measurable headway.

Define it and tell me how you can't make a measurable impact upon it.

Yes, people die. But we can stop it by continuing to invest in biotech.

No, that would pay a lot of skilled workers a damn good wage for a couple of years. Yachts employ a lot of highly paid people.

The yacht is a tangible item that will last and can be pointed to with pride by the workers. Pointless work damages us.

In fact all that's been happening is trickle up, since the wealthiest keep siphoning more and more money, such that we essentially have no middle class left.

I like how we use the word class and then deny having a class/caste system.

But when you sell for $12B and didn't take investment so all goes directly to you, how can you not allocate at least a million for each employee and change their life? With 1200 employees that's only $1.2B. They can easily give everyone even $2M and have zero impact of their life. What two people can do with $12B which they cannot do with $9B? (Yes I know, the final amount is much less after taxes, fees, etc)

Obv they don't need to allocate money equally, it makes more sense to do it based on tenure.

I could easily give away $10k to charity and save multiple lives[1] without impacting my quality of life, and given that you are on HN, you likely have $10k you could live without as well. We are literally choosing to have money in some retirement account over saving lives - why would you expect founders to give away money just to make rich tech workers more rich?

[0]: https://the.ink/p/billionaire-wealth-just-got-wealthier [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-worlds-best-charity-can-...

Amazon's tech employees are awarded shares. They are getting life changing money already. But it's not that relevant because here we're talking about a one time event that happened and the employees who were part of that success story should be compensated. It's the right thing to do.

The only argument you can make that I may partially agree with is that why giving the money to the employees. They can donate it for better causes than helping tech employees being more rich. I think in this particular case there's plenty of money to do both and the founders still be left with billions. Allocating $2B to the employees and the rest $10B to be split by the two founders and whatever donations they would like to make sounds like a win-win for everyone and a pretty rational thing to do. I'm not expecting them to give most of the money to the employees. Someone mentioned they have allocated $500M; that's really great but I still think it's too low given the amount of money. I think 10 - 15% is more reasonable.

The point of RSUs is to retain talent that is deemed critical to making the acquisition successful. Your VP of finance isn’t getting any RSUs. The acquiring company probably doesn’t need her, and she possesses no critical knowledge that any other senior financial person doesn’t also possess.

Individual developers often get higher RSUs than managers. Why? More experience with the code and domain knowledge, especially if the engineering manager wasn’t an IC who grew into the role.