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Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

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Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#211
post #173
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point. I am generally opposed to crime, legal and otherwise. But stealing from the grifters not only has a certain moral justice to it, it might even be a net social positive.

He's like Omar.

That did cross my mind! But what makes Omar different is that he understood his place in the world and was honest about it. Both with himself and with the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3i36ybA8Ms

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#212
post #155

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

> Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.

GP carefully said "package," not salary. Package includes stock compensation.

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#213
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, who's ripping off? It's a legal contract.

Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off? Tons of places commonly associated with ripping people off use contracts to do it. Car lots, telcos. Banks.

If I were to formalize my colloquial understanding of the phrase "ripped off" it would be something like: a transaction took place between two parties where upon evaluation of the results of the transaction after-the-fact revealed that the overall expectations were not met by one party and had the offended party known fully how the transaction was going to play out, the either would not have entered into it or would have only entered into it for a drastically different amount of money.

This morning, I went to a bakery and ordered a blueberry muffin. It was fresh and moist and delicious. I was satisfied. If it had instead cost the same money but been dry and crumbly and had a taste of old socks, I would have considered myself to have been "ripped off". But I put no thought into the transaction, I had a wide range of acceptable outcomes, and I did almost no due diligence beforehand to ensure I was going to get the expected result.

So now, you ask:

> Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off?

If transactions exist along an possibility-for-ripoff spectrum from "ordering a blueberry muffin for breakfast" to "hiring a C-level exec for X years for $YYY,YYY,YYY", then the closer you get to the latter transaction, the more specific the contract should be about expectations.

Every step along the way to having a signed contract normally involves an increased awareness of expectations by both parties. That's what the contract is. And the moment of signing a contract is an intentional decision to move forward with the transaction as specified. It's certainly possible to subvert the normal process in such a way that you obfuscate your intentions, but even then, the results of your intentions must show up in the contract language itself, or they won't count. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head, or you're not intellectually capable of entering a contractual relationship, the moment of signing your name to a contract is a moment where you are affirming that you aren't being "ripped off", that you've considered the terms and are willingly agreeing to abide by them.

Perhaps it's still possible to do all that and consider yourself to have been ripped off. And perhaps your examples are good examples of such cases. But if your board or C-level executives sign a contract for employment of a high-level executive which includes a 9-figure deal for compensation and they don't have more awareness than a poor person going to a car lot, they didn't get "ripped off", they're ripping off the investors or shareholders by collecting whatever salary they're collecting.

IANAL, also not a C-level exec, also not particularly smart about how crypto "works", but this all seems like fairly obvious stuff.

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#214

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

dont forget how much google is still paying android founder's golden parachute after the many sexual accusations against him... I think he beats this.

yes, but "android founder." What great product innovation did this guy pioneer at CB? Any justification at all for a $100M payday?

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. Coinbase has an $11.6b market cap which means he extracted a little under 1% of the entire company’s value in two years.

> Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. This has nothing to do with "product", though. Memestocks are down ~80%. Crypto prices down ~70%. Volumes are down even more in many segments... >97% for NFTs. Just because Coinbase was at one time valued almost 10x what it is now, doesn't mean that was the correct value - and "product" ruined it.

Yeah, but isn't it the chief product officers job to figure out how to isolate their company from this?

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#216

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

The good old a16z heist. Rugpull on investors after.

I've defended crypto in the past but its increasingly clear that this is all basically academic BS, but with a financial component. Theoretically, its nice to have a "digital gold" alternative to store your wealth away from authoritarian governments. But most of crypto thrives in countries with strong democratic traditions and no history of extended and widespread government overreach.

All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them.

They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on.

I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#217
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, who's ripping off? It's a legal contract.

Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off? Tons of places commonly associated with ripping people off use contracts to do it. Car lots, telcos. Banks.

Ripping off, literally, is theft. In the legal contexts you're talking about, it's used as a hyperbolic metaphor. Those are distinct meanings. Arguing about it is pointless.

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#218

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

You may not agree with it but you gotta respect the hustle.

Why? Why do you have to respect this hustle?

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#219
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Handling them is not the same as preventing them.

Handling them means preventing the company from being harmed by them. To simplify, if you depend on market X then hedging your bet means also profiting if market X collapses.

There are plenty of situations where that is impossible, and the best you can do is minimizing harm.

Re: Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

#220
post #140

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

This philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrated. It's pervasive through American society that pulling the wool over the eyes of shadowy entities (large corporations, the government etc...) is a virtue but every time it's done it pulls a lot of money out of the hands of people that could use it more and fu…

In the 90s, my relatives first came to the US. In those days, there were newspaper dispensing machines on the sidewalk, which worked like this:

1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.

2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.

3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.

4. You close the door and it locks.

The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"

If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.

I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.

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