This is like an anti-comment. No part of it makes sense.
The employees do not own part of the company. They're promised a bonus in the (unlikely) instance of a major liquidity event.
Granting them that bonus in no way injures any other element of their comp. This is so much the case that Fried says most of his employees have probably forgotten they even have this bonus. That's not what you say when you're using a comp scheme as leverage with your employees.
You have no idea what 37signals people make, how profit sharing and incentive comp work, or why people choose to work there. But you feel just fine snarking about them because they don't fit into the "first engineering hire gets 5%" shoot-the-moon mold we normally talk about on HN.
Dude. You totally misunderstood my comment. An actual ownership stake means you share in both profits and acquisitions. A typical employee profit sharing means the employees shares in profits but not in an acquisition unless they also get stock options. In the scheme described, the employees share in acquisitions but not profit. So it is the anti-profit sharing. Anti- not meaning bad. Anti- meaning opposite. Maybe not the deepest thing in the world, but geez, you took it a bit too seriously.
Options or restricted shares --- or even the common stock of publicly traded companies --- do not automatically entitle the owners to a share of the profits. Profit sharing and equity are orthogonal issues.
The employees do not own part of the company. They're promised a bonus in the (unlikely) instance of a major liquidity event.
Granting them that bonus in no way injures any other element of their comp. This is so much the case that Fried says most of his employees have probably forgotten they even have this bonus. That's not what you say when you're using a comp scheme as leverage with your employees.
You have no idea what 37signals people make, how profit sharing and incentive comp work, or why people choose to work there. But you feel just fine snarking about them because they don't fit into the "first engineering hire gets 5%" shoot-the-moon mold we normally talk about on HN.