"Everyone gets the same amount of equity as the CEO" would be a morale booster. "Everyone gets paid the same as the CEO" is at best a nice-to-have.

Everyone’s different but money pays rent in ways equity doesn’t, so especially for more junior people the money is a massive benefit.

In practice I think that motivated people are fine with non-wild salaries, but with early stage stuff it’s way too common to see people try to use equity as a replacement for salary. Your employees stressing out over money will cause them to perform less well.

Don't get me wrong - I said this in my own comment on this post - I'm glad they're transparent and that they're paying people a living wage given the risks of a startup. I just think they're overselling what this achieves.

I think the letter addresses this perfectly: equity depends on risk you take, the earlier you joined the more you get seems very reasonable.

Does it?

This is inherently unequal as explored by Dan Olsen in The Line Goes Up

If you weren't born yet, you lack access to that equity

Except that undermines some of the core points of the letter. They talk about transparency, but are still being quite opaque. They talk about teamwork, but as employee 50, how am I supposed to feel like I'm on the same team as employee 10, when he stands to make several times more than I do if we succeed?

Isn't this the case in every startup?

No. Key late hires will often get more equity than long time junior employees.

Yes, but it's rare that employee 10 contributes to the success of a company that has a huge liquidity event at the same multiple as his or her equity multiple as compared with employee 50.

As employee 10 why would I have to take more risks, put hard work if I m going to make as employee 1000 who did little?

Anyway, the beauty of such transparency is that you can decide whether it is fair for you or not.

Presumably then you'd have the opportunity to swap some of that comp for equity (buy shares). That would be my way of balancing it, anyway.

For 99.9% of the population, being paid the same as the CEO is a moral booster.

That's because 99.9% of the population work for a CEO making millions of dollars a year, not $191k at a startup.

$191k is a HUGE wage for A LOT of people. If you're scoffing at that you need to realize you're living in a bubble. Outside of Silicon Valley that's even a huge wage for a dev.

... But not in the bay area. It would make you comfortable, but not rich.

Yeah, but they are talking about 99+% of the population here, so I assume that's not just the bay area, or we're really in a bubble.

Surely I'm not the only one who would settle for comfortable?

I have no interest in being rich, personally.

Not trying to pass judgement on anyone, just genuinely curious how common it is in SV to be unhappy with an income that would make you comfortable, but not rich.

The article specifically says it would put you in the top 5% of earners in the US.

How many people who live in this area are in said top 5%?

Jeez, how much freaking money are programmers paid in SV that they'd be unhappy earning $191k?

I live in probably the most expensive country on Earth, Norway, and at that wage I could work for 10-15 years, and with some smart, fairly conservative investing, assuming good times in the markets I could easily get retired at 40-45 if I wanted to.

Granted I live and generally prefer a very frugal lifestyle even when I am making good money, but still by my back of the mental napkin estimation I could even have 2 kids, a spouse, house and car and still have a ton of disposable income left over to save/invest.

Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?

I pay $3k per month for a 1 bed flat which comes out as 20% of my household income - I don’t feel poor out here with a postdoc wife and my own salary that’s not FANG. Life in a nice part of Palo Alto. The HN bubble is a bubble, I wouldn’t worry about it.

What's the square footage on that flat, if you don't mind, and is it detached? Just trying to get an idea of the market.

Still ~half my bizarro world number though, hot damn.

750 if I remember right! It’s in what I can only describe as a holiday resort looking apartment block, with a dog park, swimming pool, and fire pit area.

That actually sounds really nice at that price point.

750 is a pretty damn big one bed(room?) apartment for sure, and with the perks, prime location and presumably high end building standards, the price seems very reasonable. Probably similar to what I'd have to fork out for a much more central apartment in Oslo, at a similar size and standard.

True but Oslo is a real city, Palo Alto is similar to the suburbs. I'm moving to Stockholm in the summer and much prefer the look of housing out there!

> Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?

Kinda yea.

The average rent in the bay is around $3500, but for a house that is big enough for a family (eg. 3br, garage, etc) you're probably north of $6k. Don't forget, in America, you have to consider healthcare and other costs that may not be priced equally in Norway. The bay also has more expensive food, gas, and other daily expenses etc than the much of the rest of the US.

For example, I pay ~5k a month for a 2Br unit with a garage, at roughly 1k sqft.

I guess there's a lot of things I take for granted that Americans have to pay for. I have to pay about $30 for a GP or specialist appt. And about $30 monthly in meds. That's 2 scrips that are completely free and one generic off-label that's completely out of pocket.

And that's it. Overnight admissions to more or less any health institution is completely free of charge(dental care is a whole other ballgame though, it's not socialised very much yet for adults, though slowly getting there). Similarly if I had kids, future tuition would not be an issue since Norwegian universities don't have tuition.

Thinking about it more it wouldn't be possible for me to live as frugally as I do in the US. Not without sacrificing health care.

To put my frugality in context:

Rent is ~$1K/mo(including electricity and fiber internet), which is about 60% of my income(or rather, 60% of 1/12 of what I earned total last year after taxes. It's complicated since I only take short-term consultancies through friends if they look fun. Most of the time I don't work, except on passion projects). That rent gets me a ~50sq. meter basement apartment on the outskirts of oslo, right on the edge of a beautiful river valley in an affluent neighbourhood. Apartment is nice, the juxtaposition of suburb and wilderness is ideal for my outside cat, who has a cat flap and is almost entirely independent if I fill his bowls once or twice a day. I still manage to afford good pet insurance, and a little saving headroom which I split 50/50 into a rainy day fund and fairly risky(but tiny amounts, so it doesn't feel so scary), cheap stocks. 4x so far. I save half my stock returns and reinvest the rest.

I buy dry foods in bulk, perishables at a discount. My annual transportation budget is about $300(public or legs only).

I guess you could say if SVers are in a high cost, high income bubble, I exist in the opposite cut every cent because I like the challenge and I hate working bubble. So I get pretty flabbergasted sometimes when exposed to the numbers floating around the SV bubble.

Mind you Oslo is the most expensive part of Norway in terms of property; I could go rural and probably decimate my rent but I'm too urban for that.

The entire living arrangement you describe would have to change pretty radically if/when you had a spouse and kids... That's basically the rub with all this.

True. Luckily for me I have no interest in children or cohabitation!

> Is there something I'm missing? Is rent in the valley $80k a year or some bizarro world number?

I moved from a LCOL where I paid $1200/mo in mortgage + escrow on a 2600sqft 4br house, to a MCOL where I pay $3600/mo in rent for a 1200sqft 3br townhouse. The Bay Area is a HCOL in the US, for a similar property what I have now, it'd be $5k-$6k/mo in rent, plus everything else is also more expensive. Back of napkin, $191k/yr is roughly $128k/yr after taxes, which is roughly $10800/mo after taxes. If rent is $6k/mo, utilities are $400/mo, a car fully laden is $700/mo, and food is $1000/mo, you're left with just $2700, and I'm ignoring significant other expenses. If you have a child (which I do), childcare in SFBA is around $2500/mo, it's around $1800/mo where I'm at now.

Best case scenario, you can save $2k/mo, which puts you ahead of the majority of Americans. You're also renting, which has a continually rising cost which you have no control over. To buy a house you need 20% down to get a traditional mortgage, a typical (for the rest of America) home in SFBA is $3M on the low end, but probably closer to $4M. To save up the $600k you need for a down payment on a $3M house, it'll take 300 months saving $2k/mo, which is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS. So it'll take you 25 years, just to save the down payment so you can get a 30 year mortgage for a house in SFBA on $191k/yr. In 25 years, that $3M house /will/ be at least $5M just due to inflation, which means you're hitting a moving target, if you predict the rise and target it for savings, now you need 500 months or just shy of 42 years to save the /down payment/.

The SFBA is nearly the most expensive place on Earth to live. Norway doesn't even come close.

I make >$300k/yr in an MCOL, I did an analysis and determined if I wanted to move to the SFBA without a massive sacrifice in quality of life for my family, I'd need to earn at MINIMUM $700k/yr to match what we already have, and more realistically closer to $900k/yr. $191k/yr is not even worth considering in SFBA.

EDIT: That said, if this was a remote offering, that's a very decent salary in most of America, and Oxide is a very interesting company with people working there I'd love to work with just so I could be surrounded by their brilliance.

In response to your edit, only about a quarter of the company is in the Bay Area today.

That's great to hear. My comment was more to put into some real numbers the cost of living in SFBA for the grandparent, since they seemed to be under some illusions. In most of the US, that's a very decent salary and would be more than doable, I think in the Bay it's only possible if you already own a home and/or are separately independently wealthy. Which honestly, is fine, more people need to not live in SFBA and live in the rest of the US, even in major cities, which are massively better from a COL perspective.

I’m in the Bay Area and make slightly less than $191k. Me and my wife are very happy financially :) This is a good idea and if you want money then you have to make the company more profitable which is awesome!

95% of the population makes less than $191k, though.

If everyone was paid the same as the CEO, at many startups everyone would quit.

Fair, but perhaps they’d also work as hard as the CEO if they were paid the same and had equal preferred founder shares instead of common shares. Also, when was the last time you heard of employees with equity getting a secondary to take money off the table vs founders getting to do so? It’s not the disparity per se (because at some point, there is a demarc between the population willing to sleep on the floor and eat ramen for org success vs those not and a corresponding comp delta), but the disconnect between the disparity and the output expectations.

Edit: I’m aware of the VC backed share structure. My thesis is if you want more ownership in your dream from your employees, give them more equitable ownership in the enterprise.

At VC-funded tech companies, founders typically have common stock just like employees.

Many times the founders don't have preferred shares and just common as well

VCs many times being the only winners or only ones to get any money back

Has this ever happened in real life?

We’re trading anecdotes here, but in all of the Series A and earlier startups I’m familiar with, the Founder/CEO is the the lowest paid person in the company. I would assume that non-Founder CEOs being hired in would typically be the highest paid individuals though.

There are headlines where the CEO takes $1 in salary, but realistically those are few and far between, and the CEO is usually well compensated in stock options and company jet usage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary

Our employees make several x what our founders make.

It is fairly common for CEOs at pre-scale startups to pay themselves just enough to live on.

To be concrete, I've heard numbers like $50k being thrown around.

191'000 USD / yr "even if it's not a lot" ?

I’m a software engineer, live in an area with a way lower cost of living than the Bay Area, work for a company almost exactly the same size, and $191k would be a significant pay cut for me. It really isn’t a lot depending on your role, level of experience, etc, and that’s extra true for the Bay Area.

You're an extreme outlier, then. Most Bay Area software salaries are going to cap out around $190k - $230k range, except at FAANG or FAANG-like companies.

The median Bay Area salary for all levels is about 230k, so closer to the top of your suggested range. 190k would be a 20% lower than median pay, so definitely lower than usual for sure.

I don’t think this is accurate (and it is not in my experience)

levels.fyi puts the median salary for _juniors_ at 180k and the 90th percentile at 230k. The data is obviously imperfect but on average it’s fairly accurate. My personal experience also aligns with this.

Senior is around 300-500k and Staff/Manager can get extremely silly.

levels.fyi is weighted heavily towards FAANG and FAANG-like companies.

For startups, Levels.fyi is not a useful resource.

This is roughly the Senior (5-10 YOE) salary range at Bay Area startups post-Series A.

Staff-level or higher starts at around $230K and occasionally reaches $275K.

The salary data comes from researching roughly 250 Bay Area startups. I'm personally defining startups as some combination of: Series A - D, founded post-2015, less than 100 Engineers.

Not a lot for total compensation for a software engineer with non-zero tenure in the bay area. For a point of comparison an SFPD officer starts at 105k and gets up to 145k before overtime and this is pretty average in the bay.

I think they meant that, in general, startups are not able to compete purely on salary. I don't think they're saying that Oxide's salary is not a lot.