You mean PPUs or smoke and mirrors compensation. RSUs are actually worth something.

why are PPUs “smoke and mirrors” and RSUs “worth something”?

i suspect people commenting this don’t have a clue how PPU compensation actually works

> Note at offer time candidates do not know how many PPUs they will be receiving or how many exist in total. This is important because it’s not clear to candidates if they are receiving 1% or 0.001% of profits for instance. Even when giving options, some startups are often unclear or simply do not share the total number of outstanding shares. That said, this is generally considered bad practice and unfavorable for employees. Additionally, tender offers are not guaranteed to happen and the cadence may also not be known.

> PPUs also are restricted by a 2-year lock, meaning that if there’s a liquidation event, a new hire can’t sell their units within their first 2 years. Another key difference is that the growth is currently capped at 10x. Similar to their overall company structure, the PPUs are capped at a growth of 10 times the original value. So in the offer example above, the candidate received $2M worth of PPUs, which means that their capped amount they could sell them for would be $20M

> The most recent liquidation event we’re aware of happened during a tender offer earlier this year. It was during this event that some early employees were able to sell their profit participation units. It’s difficult to know how often these events happen and who is allowed to sell, though, as it’s on company discretion.

https://www.levels.fyi/blog/openai-compensation.html

Edit:

I’m realizing we had the exact same conversation a month ago. I’m guessing you have more insider information.

As an outsider it looks like smoke and mirrors.

Everything OpenAI does is about weights.

bro does their ceo even lift?

When I looked into it and talked to some hiring managers, the big names were offering cash comp similar to total comp for big tech, with stock (sometimes complicated arrangements that were not options or RSUs) on top of that. I’m talking $400k cash for a senior engineer with equity on top.

> big names

Big names where? Inside of openai? What does that even mean?

The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi

> The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi

confident yet wrong

not only can you get that much at AI companies, netflix will also pay that much all cash - and that’s fully public info

> not only can you get that much at AI companies

Please show not tell

> netflix will also pay that much all cash

Okay that's true

Netflix is just cash, no stock. That’s different from 400k stock + cash.

> The only place you can get 400k cash base for senior is quantfi

That statement is false for the reasons I said. I’m not sure why your point matters to what I’m saying

Because op’s usage of base implies base + stock. including a place where base = total comp is really misleading and is just being unnecessarily pedantic about terminology.

OP is correct that a base cash of 400k is truly rare if you’re talking about typical total comp packages where 50% is base and 50% is stock.

quantfi doesn’t pay stock at all usually so i disagree that it implies cash + stock

I don’t know what point you’re trying to make other than being super pedantic. This was a discussion about how OpenAI’s base of 400k is unique within the context of a TCO in the 800-900k range. It is. That quantfi and Netflix offer similar base because that’s also their TCO is a silly argument to make.

> This was a discussion about how OpenAI’s base of 400k is unique within the context of a TCO in the 800-900k range.

That's not how I interpret the conversation.

I see a claim that 900k is a BS number, a counterargument that many big AI companies will give you 400k of that in cash so the offers are in fact very hot, then a claim that only finance offers 400k cash, and a claim that netflix offers 400k cash.

I don't see anything that limits these comparisons to companies with specific TCOs.

Even if the use of the word "base" is intended to imply that there's some stock, it doesn't imply any particular amount of stock. But my reading is that the word "base" is there to say that stock can be added on top.

You're the one being pedantic when you insist that 400k cash is not a valid example of 400k cash base.

Notice how the person being replied to looked at the Netflix example and said "Okay that's true". They know what they meant a lot better than you do.

ok so the conversation starts out with 900k TCO with 400k in cash, a claim that that’s BS and then morphs into a discussion about a TCO of 400k all cash being an example of equivalent compensation to OpenAI packages?

Nobody said it was equivalent. The subdiscussion was about whether you can even get that much cash anywhere else, once TCO got pulled apart into cash and stock to be compared in more detail.

Again, the person that made the original claim about where you can get "400k cash base" accepted the Netflix example. Are you saying they're wrong about what they meant?

Amazon pays 400k cash lol. Many companies do

Up until 2 years ago you were extremely wrong and you're still wrong: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-07/amazon-is...

It's amazing to me how many people are willing to just say the first thing that comes to their head while knowing they can be fact-checked in a heartbeat.