Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 292 posts

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#221

Post by chii »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #216
majormajor wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really follow your examples, but I think there's a part of startup comp structures that's worth calling out in general. Equity distribution ratios are way different than salary ones. Your boss in a mature company may make 20% more than you, give or take. Your boss in a early stage startup may have 10x (or more!) more equity than you. Even if they don't have 10x to lose.

Yes I think that is more or less what I am talking about. In a democracy the tendency is towards fairer equitable distribution of wealth (why FDR was called a traitor to his class, why Jim Crow laws exist etc). It is one factor in why companies are not democracies- but I think (hope?) we may see much experimentation in democratic decision making to try and make it as speedy as hierarchical companies (hmm - there is l…

> It is one factor in why companies are not democracies

societal democracy works because everybody is born into a society equally.

A company democracy doesn't work because not everyone is "born" into the company - the founders are more born, since they put up initial capital. If the employees also put up capital, they will get an apportioned vote.

So a company _is_ a democracy, but the votes aren't tied to lives like in society, but tied to capital. Each dollar buys you a vote.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#222

Post by LudwigNagasena »

mrtesthah wrote: post #148
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The entire concept of Amazon being a company at all is a legal fiction granted as a privilege that can be revoked as easily as it was given. Ok, but how does getting rich because of moving boxes at Amazon rather than Walmart make more sense?

Maybe our goal as a society shouldn’t be to decide who gets rich, but rather to do what it takes to ensure fair distribution of resources such that everyone’s basic needs for food, housing, healthcare, and education are met. That’s difficult to do when wealth is concentrated among a very small group of people.

That’s also difficult when people set up dichotomies like Bezos vs his workers and disregard the entire world.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#223

Post by tsimionescu »

tjs8rj wrote: post #208
kortilla wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You used that employee’s labor in conjunction with a bunch of other things to produce more value than the wages. If the value was in just the work alone and not the work directed at the right things in the right environment, there would be no point in working for Amazon and you could just collect the entire revenue yourself. This is the main reason it’s completely illogical to expect that an employee receive most of…

This is the answer and why the labor theory of value tends to fall flat without due consideration to the labor of managers and the cumulative returns of labor. If your work earns $100k/y in revenue for a company, that doesn't mean your work created it entirely. The continued dividends of organization of the company, customer acquisition, legal apparatus, support of your entire organization made that revenue possible…

While you're right that you have to account for the entire organization, not just the engineers (obviously), the gap between what the owners earn compared to all other employees combined is still wildly disproportionate.

It's of course hard to precisely quantify these things, but the worsening gap between worker and owner incomes is quite obviously not proportional to any change in how much value owners add to a corporation compared to workers (if anything, workers' contribution has been increasing, not decreasing, as productivity tools and techniques have been advancing).

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#224

Post by chii »

lmm wrote: post #187
sdf131 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source. Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. I’m the one taking the risk yet the government benefits if that risk pays off but doesn’t compensate me if it doesn’t.

> The capital being invested has already been taxed at the source. So? A worker has already paid all kinds of taxes in their life, but they still get taxed on their income. > Capital gains shouldn’t even be taxed. I earned it, paid taxes on it; what I do with it beyond that is no one’s business. Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income. My time is…

> Your original capital is yours, but if you get income from it, you should be taxed the same as any other income.

capital is what makes future productivity improvements possible. If you took a risk investing your capital, but that return is taxed the same as wage income (which has zero risk associated with it), you would be discouraged from investing that capital, and instead consume more of it (ala, why invest in your business buying plant and equipment, when you could just go on a lavish vacation!).

The low capital tax is to encourage more capital investment, because those with capital has the choice to not invest (and thus society as a whole loses the potential benefits of such investment). People with wage income don't tend to have the option of _not _ working, so lowering their tax won't encourage _more_ wage income.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#225

Post by chii »

rswail wrote: post #203
triceratops wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense. But why is the top rate for capital gains only 20% when it's 38% for income? (plus whatever the state adds on top). Why aren't there more brackets that go higher for capital gains as well?

> A lower rate for the same amount of income in capital gains compared to salary makes sense. Why? This argument is often given as an axiom without any reasoning behind it. There is often handwaving about "risk", but a worker has risks due to not being able to supply the labor that they are selling. They invested in their labor through paying for education and training. Why is their "risk" not considered the same as…

> Why is their "risk" not considered the same as capital "risk"?

a worker gets paid when they worked - there's no capital risk. They took a risk when they invest in skills for the job, but that risk isn't capital risk. If you are saying that their job should compensate for the initial risk they took getting educated, then i would say this risk pay-off is embedded in the salary of the job they took.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#226

Post by tsimionescu »

fsckboy wrote: post #214
wbsss4412 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that’s basically is my point. The thesis I was responding to was that tech unicorns don’t exist in Europe due to taxes and regulations. If we are to take the content of your post at face value, that thesis is wrong. It was due to sand hill road being where sand hill road is. That may have something to do with taxes and regulations to a degree, but that isn’t a sufficient explanation.

taxes and regulations could be a sufficient explanation for why unicorns are birthed in the US. and within the US, "why SV?" might simply have another orthogonal explanation.

> taxes and regulations could be a sufficient explanation for why unicorns are birthed in the US.

If that were the case, you would have to see unicorns in Delaware and Texas and many other places in the US, especially since many of these have a much more lax tax regime than California or New York.

The fact that unicorns are almost exclusively bred in two cities in the US actually suggests that the influence of the tax and employment regimes is overwhelmingly dwarfed by other factors.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#227

Post by tsimionescu »

chii wrote: post #221
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I think that is more or less what I am talking about. In a democracy the tendency is towards fairer equitable distribution of wealth (why FDR was called a traitor to his class, why Jim Crow laws exist etc). It is one factor in why companies are not democracies- but I think (hope?) we may see much experimentation in democratic decision making to try and make it as speedy as hierarchical companies (hmm - there is l…

> It is one factor in why companies are not democracies societal democracy works because everybody is born into a society equally. A company democracy doesn't work because not everyone is "born" into the company - the founders are more born, since they put up initial capital. If the employees also put up capital, they will get an apportioned vote. So a company _is_ a democracy, but the votes aren't tied to lives like…

This values capital over labor to a far too large extent. The value of a (successful) company is overwhelmingly dominated by labor - including the labor of the founders and CEOs, to be clear - not by original capital investments. But, ownership is only afforded to those who contribute capital, and ~0% to those contributing labor (this does vary between companies, as some do offer equity as part of the labor contract, but typically only to certain employees; its very unlikely the cleaning person will be offered any equity, for example).

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#228

Post by France_is_bacon »

xmprt wrote: post #218
edanm wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Senior engineers would make NFL wages That is an absurd exaggeration, unless by "senior engineers" you are including people who do a lot more than "just" engineering, e.g. build companies, build products, etc. The reason NFL wages are so high is not just that they bring in a lot of money, it's that the players are to a large extent irreplaceable. If you take the, say, 500 most talented players in the US at a give…

> If you take the, say, 500 most talented players in the US at a given time, you can't just replace them with the next 500 most talented players and get the same outcome I genuinely believe that a league made of the 500-1000 rank players would be just as (or at least almost as) entertaining as one with the top 500 players. Relative rank is what matters and it's why NCAA March Madness is so popular despite being made…

No post body was provided.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#229

Post by tsimionescu »

daenz wrote: post #89
jdavis703 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Amazon’s board decided to reallocate the CEO’s compensation package and grant it to employees, it would increase the entry level salaries of warehouse workers from $18/hour to $18.45/hour. Not a bad bump, but also historically low by Amazon pay bumps. But it’s also not going to solve income inequality… And very likely there are few people qualified to be CEO of Amazon who’d do the job for $18.45/hour.

Not to mention the financial fallout of not having an experienced leader at the helm. Sure, it would coast for awhile without a leader, and I'm sure someone will try to explain to me how it could be run completely democratically, but eventually a competitor with a competent leader would eat their lunch.

I know one or two democratic countries that are doing OK despite being democratic.

Democracy doesn't have to be leaderless: we have a good few hundred years of experience in running entities many times more complex than a company using democratic processes, appointing leaders by vote etc.

Re: The Collison Brothers Built Stripe into a $95B Unicorn

#230

Post by France_is_bacon »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #82
kareemsabri wrote: post #60

I know the Collisons are brilliant founders and I have long admired Stripe (I've used their Golang API client as inspiration many times in my own code) but it's kind of unfortunate how founder lore really minimizes employees. Stripe has 4,000 people working there, this article mentions only two other employees in passing (the CPO and CFO). Surely many others were brilliant contributors to Stripe's becoming a $95B uni…

I think that this is not just a story-telling problem. It is a wealth-sharing problem as well. I don't know much about stripe, but think of Bezos as a pretty good example - to a O(n) rounding he has 100 billion dollars and 1 million employees. Why is he getting 100,000 from each employee ? Not because those employees send him a cheque. But because of particular outcomes of share capital, and corporate law. Decisions…

[dead]
Post reply on HN