21–30 of 218 posts
Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.
The thing with excessive remuneration with startup’s are, it’s highly unlikely one could switch to a better paying job when the need arises. Update : To people who ask why would someone need another job? There are multitude of reasons, a well funded startup which could pay several times the industry standard - when fails; puts excessively paid employees to compete in the same standarised job market. If you live in th…
Sure, but at $3M a year, sock $2.5M away, live extremely comfortably, and have one hell of a rainy day fund.
Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.
How is a company $2.5 billion in (projected) revenue a "startup"?
But your point is well taken.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, but at $3M a year, sock $2.5M away, live extremely comfortably, and have one hell of a rainy day fund.
If 80-90% of it is in stock / options with vesting (as I'd suspect it is based on that article) it is likely only true after the targets / target dates are hit.
My initial reaction was:
Does anyone actually do this? If someone says "salary" package, I'd assume all of it is cash.
but then I took a peek.
> Top performers can make $1 million in salary and bonus a year, plus options, according to people familiar with its hiring. Total compensation can exceed $3 million. Zhang declined to comment on specific figures, saying most employees prefer stock over cash.
So it is $1M in salary/bonus and up to $2M+ in stock grants bla bla (paper that I can't spend).
> Zhang isn’t backing off his aggressive plans, despite the controversies over pay and business practices. Asked about one competitor's concern that Toutiao is trying to hire 200 AI engineers, a huge number given the limited pool of talent, Zhang says that's not quite right: "It may be more than 200.”
This is the interesting part. at $1M per head, 200 engineers is $200M. It sounds like a lot and it is. I feel like someone is getting taken for a ride and I suspect it is the poor idiots who are taking $3M+ in paper over a little under $1M in cash salary and bonuses.
I'd take the $1M cash and save like crazy because this is ridiculous overspending. I cannot imagine why you'd need 200+ data scientists to work on this project.
But then I want to remind the reader that I have been wrong before and spectacularly so about Dropbox. I cannot believe Drew and gang are doing so well for themselves. Make sense that I am a poor idiot on the Internet.
Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.
If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that information. Which explains the seemingly crazy $2.5 billion in revenue.
Doing that service well, is every bit as valuable as something like Twitter or YouTube. It's about communicating valuable information to an extremely large audience. Why shouldn't that be quite valuable?
It only seems trivial because the eg US and European media landscapes are well established / entrenched, the audience is stagnant (there's little to no growth in the news business in the US or Europe) and the consumers are relatively experienced at mass societal consumption.
Consider the value of portals to early US Internet adopters for one example of how this concept works. Why were AOL, Yahoo, Netscape's portal, and numerous other portal-like services, so frequently used and valuable back then (but no longer)?
The desire for more often blinds us. We all are looking for more wealth, and perhaps working for a startup like this will get us there. However, I personally think that talent is priceless. You can't just throw money for top skill. In field like startups, you have to passionate on what you're working on to make it the best it can be. Sure, say I have "top talent". But, what we fail to realize that "top talent" may no…
You need to be passionate about being a professional who only delivers the best they can.
You don't need any passion for the particular domain or project per se.
Who in their right mind can be passionate about "schlep" anyway?
Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.
You say that like it is some basic task that any idiot with a computer science degree would be able to code up in a couple of weekends. Hey, maybe it is! But that just means the competition is even more fierce so it takes a lot to stand out. Like many things, it's not achieving the 95% that makes you successful but that extra 5% on top of all the other guys that makes the difference.
Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.
Nobody will ever be happy. If someone says hey I can't pay top of market but we're doing something groundbreaking, they are talked about like they are a bunch of scammers. If someone is paying top salary but doing something mundane, it's "sigh."