All employees at a startup carry substantial risk. If you're working as a customer service rep at a startup which folds, you in all likelihood don't have the connections or financial stability that the founders and software engineers and data scientists and scrum masters have to gracefully transition to another job. If you're planning on having a kid, losing your job 3 weeks before you expected to be able to take paid parental leave is going to really throw a wrench in the works. &c &c

I don't like the argument I am about to make when used to attack minimum wage, but I think it applies here.

When you accepted the job, you knew the terms. Those included not getting equity, and those included carrying some risk with known reward.

I don't see how the owners selling retroactively makes the risk-reward balance different. Unless you consider it a risk/downside that someone else gets a windfall and you don't get to share. That seems silly to me tho. How rich someone else is does not affect how much money I need to live, with a few exceptions (inflation, friends, power dynamics in pre-existing relationships).

> How rich someone else is does not affect how much money I need to live, with a few exceptions (inflation, friends, power dynamics in pre-existing relationships).

Many people cannot afford to even own a home in the Bay Area because everyone else around is so rich. Relative wealth is important because "other rich people" drive up prices of everything, from housing, to groceries, to health care.

If my salary doesn't change, but the people around me get a 10% raise, my buying power decreases.

That holds if everyone else gets richer. It does not hold if 2 founders get richer. You barely compete with them for the same items, so it shouldn't affect your buying power at all that your founders got a windfall.

That CSR’s work is worth a certain amount. The discussion is whether that amount best serves the CSR if paid all in cash or divided into a mix of cash and equity. In Mailchimp’s case, they were clear that it was all cash and no equity and I suspect that was the preference of the CSRs as well.

Not responding to the article or the good or bad of it (frankly it bores me), but this is a strange view of “success”. There’s this strange malaise where people see something like this as their aim in life: to sell to some other guy for the big bucks as if this buyout was “the success” and as if this inducted then into Valhalla. It’s the mysticism of money.

Apart from that, if people were serious about not selling, they’d make employees meaningful shareholders. Salary entails zero loyalty and zero stake in the company on the part of the employee. In the latter case, why would you believe that they wouldn’t sell? That’s what people do.

Genuine question, what's the risk? Usually owners aren't liable for corporation debt, which I would imagine reduces financial risk, are there other types of risk?

From what I recall, the service was spun out of another company though, it didn't become its own thing before it was profitable. There was some origin risk in the original business, but MailChimp itself was arguably a low risk endeavour on the part of its founders.

and what risk is that? if the company goes under, they need to get a job like everyone else. the only “risk” is that they no longer get to be the big boss. cry me a river.

meanwhile they get to reap (in this case) 100% of the rewards from everyone else’s hard work. if that doesn’t make you angry, perhaps you should reevaluate whose interests your ideology serves.