The CEO just had a higher price than most other people.

To get $16bn cash from Facebook is hilarious.

Next time a start-up says they won't pay you market rate because of x, y, and z just walk away and laugh. For the sake of a few thousand dollars in wages, you could make them billions.

Don't work for cheap bastards. Funny how engineers are supposed to sacrifice yet we never see a lawyer or accountant charge below market rates, and their work can save businesses millions as well as jail-time.

I now feel like a jack ass for working at a MegaCorp. To be working like a donkey under a glorified email router paid 3x more than me for doing toothbrush factory era supervisors role.

And yes I do agree with you. I recently rejected a offer from a start up for offering 50% below market rate.

Seems like I made a smart decision.

WhatsApp is actually the reason why people accept less than market rate from startups. No WhatsApp employee who's been there more than a year will ever need to work again once he/she survives the "golden handcuffs" period.

I'm sure that's what Zynga employees thought too. Sure, accept less than your market rate, but there are lots of trapdoors before the cash ends up in your bank account.

I think it's quite rare that any individual employee (probably excluding founders) is responsible for a significant percentage of the value of a company.

I mean, if you assume only 10% of that value is going to employees, then you need only half a percent (0.5%) of that to get a $800k bonus.

If you've only been there 2-3 years, that's a substantial bonus that pushes your pay above market rate.

You dropped a zero.

16B * 10% * .5% = 8 Million

You are correct; I had actually meant 0.05%.

And they only have 55 employees...

Only the first few engineers get that kind of equity nowadays.

What's remarkable is that they've built up a strong engineering team without very much media attention in Silicon Valley to cultivate a "hot startup everyone wants to work for" image.

The opposite of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Dropbox, Palantir, etc...