No, but it aligns with the interests of the consumers better if you're actually targeting consumers (for the recurring revenue) rather than burning cash to get as many users as you can lock in, and then selling to someone who will milk them when they have no option.

That's true, but the product can still get worse chasing revenue from those consumers.

Hm, I've seen this line of argumentation a lot, and I'd like to name it as a fallacy. It's basically "perfect is the enemy of the good", where one good action is dismissed because it's still not perfect.

The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.

> The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.

I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.

Every company has the option of chasing extra revenue from customers. This company has no other options. Perhaps this makes them better as a company and want to develop a better product so that people naturally want to use it more. Or perhaps they, like so many companies before them, try to see how much they can milk out of their userbase before they lose it.

They also aren't immune to costs around them. If their office rent goes up, or power for their servers costs more, they have limited options. Reduce wages (unlikely), do less good, or get more from users.

> I'd like to name this as a fallacy - begging the question. The product will be better chasing revenue from you because it will be worse chasing revenue from someone else.

I said the product will be better for me. I generally believe that things are better for me when they're trying to entice me versus when they're trying to entice someone who isn't me, but we can debate that, if you want.

I agree with you that it's usually true, I just don't agree that it has to be true. When a company is well funded and focusing on userbase, that's great. When they need more money, it might not be. I know they are totally different types of companies, but look at social networks - when they are expanding they are good for everyone, once they decide it's time to earn more money from their exist users (focusing on the user) that's when it gets worse.

In Ecosia's case it's different I think - without accounts and nothing keeping you there, every customer today is a customer that needs enticing again tomorrow.

The problem with social networks is that they decide to earn more money from advertisers by selling the users. I don't know how a company can say "I'll only ever want a specific kind of customer", but at least saying "I'll never want to sell" is a step in that direction.

> when they are expanding they are good for everyone

They were very aware they were herding people like cattle into digital conclaves where they could be milked.

Strangers with candy are great for everyone, until...

I see it a lot too, and it's called the Nirvana fallacy [1]. We shouldn't do anything about tax evasion because people will evade taxes anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total amount of tax evasion). We shouldn't ban drunk driving because people will drive drunk anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total number of drunk drivers). We shouldn't trust non-profits, because they seek revenue anyway (ignoring that it's much less severe for any non-profit in comparison to a for-profit company).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

Nice, thanks for the name! Your examples are also spot on.

They can do the milking without selling - don’t they?

If they are planting a million trees a month why "worry" that they might be getting paid, sorry "milking", to do their jobs?

The company is doing the work to earn that money.

Nobody would call it "milking" money if they were a billionaire owned company rapaciously leveraging their trapped customers for every dime. I don't think its the right word to use here.

Yes, but opposite of "maximizing profits" does not automatically imply targeting consumer or better product. In this example they state that they interested in maximizing amount of tree they plant. Cool, good for them, but it's not something I'm interested in when using a search engine. After one of Vivaldi's recent updates, I was asked to try Ecosia as my default engine, and I did, but after a few days I went back to Google.

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder...

There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?).

That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee, or 64k / year. Germans notoriously don't work on the cheap - so unlikely that everyone else is working below market to line the CEO's pockets.

That said - they are still a profit seeking enterprise (another commenter noted that they aren't gGMBH - but also they set up a Feeder fund in January - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1999332/000199933224...)

Which presumably CAN be profit seeking.

So yeah - it doesn't invalidate their mission - if you're into that - but it's not 100% of what it says on the tin.

Also - monthly financial statements may be a German thing (sorry, I actually quite like Germany and Germans - just German company law is quite cumbersome) - but annual statements would give a clearer and more transparent picture.

> That's around 5,300 EUR / month per employee

If the salary is 4300 (instead of 5300) per employee for those 120, that would give the CEO the extra 120x1000 per month.

I am not implying the CEO does that, I am merely saying that "non-profit" is a relevant term and unless supervised/regulated can become a big earner for one/some/all of the staff.

Unless they report all salaries (anonymised) and this would be signed-off by an independent/external auditor (give 20k per year to one of the Big4) we would be somehow certain that there isn't a hockey-stick graph (with the CEO and his wife/husband/son/etc/) getting 70% of the salaries for 3 people versus 30% of the salaries for the 117 people.

In the US salaries for the top dogs at nonprofits is reported.

Some trick this with “consulting fees” to companies controlled by the top dogs, but it sat least something.

> the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows

Where did you get that data from? The difference might be due to headcount vs. FTE and/or including vs. excluding freelancers.

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

When you say “employee gross”, is this analogous to what we Americans colloquially refer to as “take home pay” eg the final amount you get after all taxes and the like have been removed from your pay? I know it is common in Europe to refer to salary this way but in USA it is rare, salary is usually discussed with taxes still included in the States

Super gross = the total cost of the employee paid by the company

Gross = super gross - employer contributions, usually around 20%

Net = gross - employee contributions, usually around 40%

Most employees, Europe included, talk in gross/year. It can happen that people (usually in the lower bracket) talk in net/month.

In the example above, the cost to the company is expressed in super gross, 64k. That would leave ~50k as gross, so around 30k net, or 2.5k net / month.

Enlightening! Sweden (and perhaps some of the other Nordics) seem to use net/month a lot more than gross/yr (anecdotal observation as an American expat). Everywhere I have chatted with Europeans all seem to talk in post tax numbers however by default.

The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.

I think there are two main factors to take into account:

- If you are in a lower tax bracket, the taxes are almost the same for everyone, so talking "net" is okay. If you have a more substantial income though, there starts to be more difference in net amongst people, as it depends on how your compensation is technically paid, and how much it is. So for the same gross, people can end up with different net.

- People tend to think in terms of what is wired to their bank account. For a long time, most (western) European countries did not have "source tax", meaning you would get your gross every month, and are supposed to save up for the income tax coming end of the year. That changed a lot in recent years, and more often now the income tax is directly subtracted from your monthly wages, which may direct people to talk in net.

> The unfortunate consequence of this cultural difference is that it makes it harder to compare salaries between the States and Europe.

I get you, and that's not just because of gros/net, but also just the general cost of living that changes. I lived in a baltic country for a number of years with half the gross I had in western Europe, and felt substantially wealthier.

> German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.

And you can view many of them for free at unternehmensregister.de.

You can read ALL of them for free at the source, handelsregister.de - they stopped charging for access in 2022.

Huh, I didn't know that. But it seems incomplete, at least for Baden-Württemberg. Not sure if that's a bug, an outage, or if they didn't submit all the data. On unternehmensregister.de, you can usually view lots and lots of information, including annual reports (with increasing detail, depending on company size).

As far as I understand it, on unternehmensregister.de, you only have to pay for access to files (including annual reports) of small companies that make use of the § 326 Abs. 2 HGB exception: https://www.buzer.de/326_HGB.htm And maybe for formally authenticated copies? Everything else should be free of charge.

FWIW: They have provisions in their bylaws (which can only be changed with the assent of their public interest asset-locked shareholder) that restrict salaries to a level that's commonplace in the industry specifically in Germany. In Germany, software engineers and managers tend to make a lot less than they do in the U.S., certainly not an amount of money that's a meaningful tradeoff for giving up rights to dividends and other distributions.

Yes avoiding another Mozilla situation should be a high priority for anyone interested in this area in future.

I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well.

But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion?

I honestly have no idea

In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.

That is a good estimate.

You can see US non profit compensation online - https://datarepublican.com/nonprofit/assets/

Many of the presidents/vps make in that exact range (~$200 - $300k), although there are other like:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...

Feeding America, which pays their CEO a tad under $1m.

Even if the CEO makes a million a year, it is a pittance compared to the potential equity value of a tech company.

Depending on where in the world you are, paying yourself a high wage results in much higher taxes than paying profits in the form of dividends. These taxes may benefit society at large, which may well be in line with their goals.

Oh but you can pay expenses to a "consulting company" that your wife/brother/daughter/... owns which will keep their profits and pay off dividents

Yes, you can, but that's not legal.

If you want to compare the merits of two systems, you have to do it on legal grounds. If you allow cheating, then nothing is comparable, everything is possible, no system is better.

There is also legal cheating that only works if there is enough money involved. For example, for German companies, a holding company in Malta with low corporate taxes - but it happens not to make sense for typical freelancers.

Or the Irish shenanigans of US tech companies.

Those shenanigans really ought to be illegal. They probably are to some extent.

The majority state-owned (well̃, >30% federal state and >20% city) Frankfurt airport company has a holding... sorry, "management" company in Malta. Maybe they are doing just enough business in Malta to hold up to scrutiny. Most are based on no one looking too closely. But it's not a very meaningful difference. Heck, maybe I'd occasionally fly to Malta and work from there if that helped to "optimize" taxes like the big boys.

I don't have any special information here, but I wanted to mention that's it's just as exhausting when people approach every single interaction assuming the worst possible intentions as the reverse. It's OK to not be cynical once in a while.

You're right. I don't necessarily assume the worst from them and I don't assume the worst in general, but it's difficult to switch off from the fact that this article is marketing, and it's marketing for a company that the author makes money from.

Listening to cool ideas like this is nice, but a little skepticism when sharing marketing is, I think, valid.

Yeah seriously.

"Oh no the entire company has wages - let's assume it's exploitation"

Is basic divisive language that just perpetuates the "world is bad and there is no lesser evil" bs that drives current news fatigue imo.

People are sure that 1 < 100000 but Google Vs ecosia is somehow more muddy.

“They’re trying to do better, which means they’re claiming to be perfect, but I am wise enough to know nobody’s perfect, so they’re a bunch of liars who are no better than all those other liars”

It does get fatiguing.

That's a lot of projection in a forum where you're supposed to assume the best of people you talk with. I never presented that false dichotomy.

Apologies if it seemed personal. I was observing a far too common pattern here, where, as you say, charitable interpretations are encouraged.

If only there was this much scepticism around the manifestos of Thiel, Andreesen, Yarvin and the like from within the tech community.

Nah, the guys working to give people options and save trees. THEY must be up to something

That's certainly a fair point, but currently even the (non-)possibility of shareholder ownership and for-profit takeovers seems to be on shaky ground with what OpenAI is trying.

I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.

Both of these conditions are true for Ecosia. They have bylaws that prevent excessive salaries.

In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.

Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.

The CEO of Ecosia makes less than EUR 100k per year.

At least that was the case when I interviewed there for an interim CPO role.

I don't see a problem with a non-profit CEO (or any employee) taking a large salary. Even if they do, the non-profit structure still removes large shareholders, who are not employees and can have an outsized influence without a commitment to the project or an understanding of its workings.

A successful non-profit that's also able to pay big, healthy salaries should be celebrated.

>headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit"

or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers.

there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.

Profits are bad when they exist due to unethical cost cutting. Profits are bad when they artificially lower the cost of the good by exporting the costs to other people.

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, that is not good profit.

If an oil company is profitable because they do not address the environmental impact they have, that is not good profit.

If an insurance company is profitable because they refuse required treatments for their customers, that is not good profit.

You have a very simplistic view of profit that is not based in actual history. We have centuries of seeing this exact thing happen over and over again. Just because something is profitable does not make it good. Only someone obsessed with theory while ignoring the practice could think otherwise.

In other words, profits are bad when they necessitate some threshold of negative externalities.

If a clothing company is profitable because they use slave labor, the use of slave labor is bad.

The profit is not the problem. It wouldn't be any better if the company made no profit.

This is a distinction unworthy of merit. The slave labor creates the profit. The only reason it exists is because of the profit.

On the contrary, it will be an incentive to stop.

Profits are not a measure of good. It's just as profitable to mitigate a problem that you caused as it is to authentically solve a problem for people. Profits are a measure of efficacy, but there's no reason to expect that a profitable endeavor isn't making things worse for everybody nearby.

In the narrow sense it’s good. It’s an optimization function, yes. With a wider lens it leads to problems that are just lumped into the big pile of things called Externalities. One of which is ecological collapse. Or just climate change if that sounds too drastic.

Capitalism is the most advanced mode of profit-driven systems. Where it inevitably leads to more and more inequality. Why? In part because money becomes the most fungible commodity. You can use it to buy everything (except happiness?). In turn you can buy all regulation. You can buy half of people’s everyday time (labor). There’s no breaks on it.

So it continues until some outside force stops it. Becaue it can’t regulate itself (with what, money?).

Actually economic profit is an indicator of market inefficiency. Demand is what tells you that you’re selling something of value. Extended profits mean competition hasn’t caught up yet. It has nothing to do with good or bad. If there is profit to be made in a market, firms will enter until it reaches an equilibrium where profit is 0, then when it becomes overcrowded and firms are losing money, they leave the market. This is why anticompetitive business practices are so successful at generating profits, and at the same time are so horribly bad for the free market. In an efficient market, profits converge towards zero.

"economic profit" is a different concept. non-profits, the topic of this discussion, are defined as not allowed to make "accounting profit"

Profit has two commonly used meanings. One is basically revenues minus expenses, and is essentially a measure of how successfully the company is operating.

But another is what the owners take from the company, after paying all operating expenses. In this sense, profit is basically a form of parasitism on the company: if it weren't for the need to pay its owners, the company could better achieve its goals by re-investing that same money into operating better (buying new equipment, paying its employees more/hiring more/better employees, reducing unpopular monetization to ensure client goodwill, etc). The more money that goes out of the company to shareholders, the worse the company is at operating.

Today, at least in tech, few if any l companies post a profit in the second sense (they don't pay dividends), so we often tend to think of profit in the first sense, usually for tax reasons (taxes on cash dividends are usually payable immediately). But still, a similar phenomenon as the "parasitic" profit happnes: stock buybakcs. The company "invests" its profits into buying back its own stock, as a form of paying out shareholders through increased stock price. And, similarly to paying dividends, this takes away money that the company could have used on operating more efficiently in its core industry.

Nobody wants to see grift, but we should also normalize non-profit employees and CEOs making a good living.

So your argument is that people who do good things must be poor or else they actually aren't good people?

I'd say they mustn't be filthy rich. Otherwise "doing good" clearly isn't the main priority.

I'm proud to say that I have worked for Ecosia, though ages ago. Christian, the CEO, is really one of the kindest and most honest people I have worked with. Also 100% committed to the cause, he walks the walk.

Yes I'm just some rando from the Internet, and things might have changed since I've left, but I have my faith in that guy.

Chiming in to say the same.

I was there in their earlier years. Ecosia set the standard for me what an ethical company should be like.

And hey odiroot ;)

Hi Justus. Long time no see :)

Honestly even if they had super high executive pay like current tech companies do but then used the profits for good that's still like 100x better than tech companies now.