But they just lost 37% on the "too good" money.
So where do you think these people are going next?
Following regulatory response, they have been downsizing it to a tiny speck of its former size.
Them losing folks to crypto companies is the most obvious result of the past five years, but it has more to do with their strategy struggles than the overall mindset of the engineering population.
Tokens _are_ worthless if no one wants to buy them, and pretending that is somehow different than startup equity is ignorant at best and downright predatory in the worst cases.
Crypto growth overall does not mean _your_ token is going to gain value anymore than the general growth of the economy means that startup equity is going to grow in value.
1 - token vesting contracts are often much quicker than startup grants, and public company RSUs. A few months to a year, compared to 4 years.
2 - tokens achieve liquidity much faster and more reliably, in comparison to startup companies of a similar age. this allows new organizations to compete in hiring against FAANGs, where employees also are receiving liquid things to sell.
3 - token grants can be alongside startup equity. so its an additional part of the compensation package. As such there is no compromise to rant about.
and just to acknowledge the “issue” you care about, correct a market may never occur or form for the tokens, no different than the equity, there you go, a tiny disclaimer on page 34. I agree that every employee should be objective about that, this is the same standard with every kind of organization aiming to compensate partially in non-cash, which puts us right back at square one: pick the one thats both interesting and compensates well.
Fundamentally not true. Unlike traditional markets, crypto exchanges work by leveraging AMM liquidity pools. Obviously, a token can go up/down based on supply and demand, but if there's liquidity you can literally always sell. Confusing early-stage startup equity is by far more predatory than giving someone some shitcoin with a vesting schedule. Any argument to the contrary is either disingenuous or misinformed.
With traditional equity offerings, you need to worry about: what class of stock did you get, what's the vesting preference, will you get diluted, what if you get fired, etc. I'm hardly a crypto bro, but imo startup equity is one of the biggest scams around that often takes advantage of young and inexperienced engineers that don't quite understand its financial underpinnings.
If no-one wants to buy a thing at any price, it is - by definition - illiquid. The notion that something for which there is no demand can be liquid is strange.
But it seems very much that it is true. Did you mean to make a different point?
If your point is that tokens without liquidity are worthless, then that's true (that's why initial decentralized exchange offerings always involve seeding liquidity pools, as mentioned). If your point is that tokens can get arbitrarily close to zero if everyone sells, that's also true.
But if you get a token that's being actively traded on exchanges and has healthy liquidity pools and a healthy market cap, that certainly is a better deal than some percentage "equity" an early-stage startup dangles in front of you.
Absolutely not true and this is very typical HN bubble-speak. Been helping with hiring engineers for a stealth crypto startup for the past 6 months, and getting some of the best applicants I've ever seen, most coming from FAANG. To add to this anecdote, one of my friends (FB product manager) was telling me ~Oct last year that a lot of engineers are leaving her team or churning for either TikTok or crypto startups.