> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…
Reminder that Vlad Tenev founded Robinhood, an incredibly successful app that disrupted an industry and is still best in class. There really is no replacement for a founder CEO.
Would you say the same about Travis Kalanick or Adam Neumann?
> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…
> ... took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco God I'm so sick of hearing this. It comes from people who seriously don't know what happened. let me explain: RH had (and still has) a service that you can trade immediately on signing up and sending funds rather than waiting for them to clear. This mostly works out fine because people buy different things and you have the un…
The fact that other brokerages could handle the counterparty risk with stronger financials than Robinhood (eg: by continuing to permit securities purchases) does highlight reputational risk in that you're clearly running an inferior brokerage compared to the competition. Ordinary market conditions wouldn't add visibility to this fact, but unfortunately there was always the risk and the situation had occurred.
He's perfectly capable of giving stock to these employees as well.
It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.
I think by example we can guess that you might act exactly that way (since so many other people do) but IMO the important thing is how do we as a society want people to act (ITT it would not be how this person is acting).
IMO we as a society should pass rules and laws to prevent people from acting this way ie limits on compensation.
Because then you'd still have more people than you need, except now everyone is poorly motivated, and your best people will just leave. Germany does actually have a model called "Kurzarbeit" (literally "short work") to reduce hours across the board while some of the wage losses are being offset by payment from the unemployment insurance system. The idea is to avoid layoffs during times of recession etc. which would a…
> ... your best people will just leave. Where is the evidence for this? I get that it seems like what would happen, but where are the cases proving that's what happened? Especially in an economy shedding jobs, there may not be many other places to go. Also, studies seem to find that money doesn't motivate people to perform at a higher level. https://hbr.org/2013/04/does-money-really-affect-motiv
The top talent can jump jobs on a whim in major tech hubs. The only senior programmers I know in Chicago that have been unemployed or underemployed for longer than a few weeks in the past decade were of their own volition. Maybe this is just my bubble and maybe it's just Chicago, but I doubt both of those.
All of this has already happened. Just look at the stocks of all the pandemic companies. Peleton, Teledoc, Zoom, Docusign and on and on. Pretty much all down 80%+ from their highs.
If anyone had any notion that the markets were efficient or rational in any way regarding the actual underlying value of the companies they purport to represent, I certainly hope that notion didn’t survive the pandemic - I’m not sure what world stocks were pricing in over the last two years, but it didn’t pass even a cursory smell test.
It's still going on.
Nikola, a vaporware company with absolutely 0 revenues burning $600m / year, is still "worth" $3b.
HKD, a vaporware company, is being pump and dumped and is now "worth" $150b+, the size of Bank of America, despite being 50 employees with nothing of value.
>Robinhood is struggling for capital, so I wouldn't trust them with my cash whatsoever. Why not? You're protected by SIPC for up to $500k (for securities) and $250k (for cash).
Aren’t they selling the order flow of retail traders? Protected or not. I’m not trusting them. “Robinhood” my ass
>Aren’t they selling the order flow of retail traders?
Is it charitable to accept responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and compensate those you've harmed? Or is it just common decency?
It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.
The entire purpose of the C-suite is to stay on top of macro level stuff, and its the boards purpose to make sure the C-suite is doing it. They didn't do their job. And they got rich not doing it.
> As CEO, I approved and took responsibility for our ambitious staffing trajectory—this is on me Reminder that Vlad Tenev received $800M in compensation in 2021. In the same year the company made terrible bets on crypto and banking, took an irreversible reputation hit among its core user base because of the GME fiasco, had multiple user data breaches, was subject to several investigations and was fined hundreds of mi…
I realize it's not something that happens, but I would say "taking responsibility" would mean taking, oh, I dunno, $50M of that $800M in compensation in 2021, and distributing it to those laid off? (How the hell is your life different with $750M instead of $800M anyway?)
But how would that motivate the other CEOs or aspiring CEOs to be better CEOs? /s
Is it charitable to accept responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and compensate those you've harmed? Or is it just common decency?
It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.