If the company can afford to offer competitive and attractive salaries to its employees, why would they offer equity? If I am a business owner and can afford to pay my staff well, why would I give up a portion of my company to the employees when I don't have to?
This is not some great injustice or a company acting in any kind of morally questionable way. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that in the grand scheme of things (not just the tech bubble), offering equity to employees is the exception, not the norm.
Giving employees equity can help to keep everyone aligned to the same goals. Early on in my career, I worked at a startup that paid its employees very well but did not give them equity. When the sales team pushed through a monster deal with some vaporware in it, we technical people hated it, because for us it just meant more burning the midnight oil to deliver overpromised shit, and no additional compensation. Churn among devs was huge, the codebase eventually became weighed down by technical debt, and the company cratered after a few years.
If they would've been more generous with equity (even at the expense of base salaries), I think we would've been high-fiving each other when the sales team closed a huge deal instead of cursing them under our breath and plotting our escape.
I think there's a valid question here, but it's framed as if the only standard is, 'what can I get away with'? Where do you see the nuances and what do they lead you to?
While it's nice to hire great employees, Mailchimp provides an API to send email. It's not like they're trying to solve cold fusion. Actually, wait, how many employees does Mailchimp even have? Let's check the press release...
>Founded in 2001 and based in Atlanta with offices in Brooklyn, Oakland, Vancouver, London, and Santa Monica, Mailchimp has 1,200+ employees
Mailchimp isn't an API to send emails. It's a WYSIWYG email marketing newsletter creator. If you've ever made an email newsletter that looks nice you'll understand how that is very valuable to a lot of companies.
Add in all the usual ops, customer support, business to business client management for bigger accounts, marketing, and so on and its not hard to see how it can need quite a lot of people.
Not giving equity to employees is fine by me - but it can certainly be “questioned” from a moral standpoint. (Though I think you mean “morally questionable” as euphemism for “morally wrong”)
Selling to Intuit is not fine by me - and i consider it morally questionable in both senses of the term.
OK, I'll bite. I am one of three owners of a roughly £1-1.5M pa t/o company in the UK (depends on the wind direction.) We've operated for 21 years now - it's IT Services, mainly consultancy. We've always offered a few Class B shares to time served employees in addition to salary. Not many shares but some.
I'm not too sure what on earth "late stage capitalism" means but I do know that my little firm trundles on quite happily and works slightly better for the extra incentive that directly contributing equals directly earning. We have never insisted that shareholders need work extra hours or whatever. I kick people out of the office if they work too late. Work life balance is important.
Is offering or not offering equity something that can be considered within the realms of "morally questionable"?
A business is a business and a contract is a contract. When you take up employment within a business, you engage with a contract. If the contract offered is not one you like, you are not obliged to accept it. The last two sentences are rather polarised and I accept that the real world is rather more nuanced when you consider individual cases.
Can you really call a mutually agreed equity arrangement as "morally questionable"? You might as well describe working for a salary as morally questionable too. Anyway, whose morals are we considering and what standards do they espouse? Morals don't live in a vacuum nor do morals stay attached to a single concept. Your "morals" may well not be the same as mine!
We (my little company) are quite boring, rather small and won't ever feature in a how to take over the world, unless 10^-3 unicorn suddenly becomes exciting.
I wasn't criticizing people like you (although this thread does seem to have hit a nerve). I was critizing the assumption that you are morally culpable (or indeed praise worthy) for how you run your company.
You are able to be a good boss and that's great. In fact it's probably good business to be. But you could just as easily have been born the inheritor of a sweatshop garment factory in Bangladesh and unable to make a profit unless you employed children under appalling conditions.
The economic conditions dictate the possible relationships with employees. As profits decline (late stage capitalism) in different economic sectors the options narrow.
In the future your economic sector may become the target of a wave of consolidation. If a competitor starts buying up all the competition and adopting a more aggressive business model with lower prices you will be forced to adapt.
"In the future your economic sector may become the target of a wave of consolidation."
It's called Microsoft 8) Oh well, this MD rocks Arch Linux on his laptop and workstation. I put up with Exchange thanks to Evolution (and recently: Kmail.) I login via winbind-nss and leave a trail of Kerberos tickets wherever I go.
"I was critizing the assumption that you are morally culpable (or indeed praise worthy) for how you run your company."
This is not some great injustice or a company acting in any kind of morally questionable way. In fact, it would be more accurate to say that in the grand scheme of things (not just the tech bubble), offering equity to employees is the exception, not the norm.