Live data from Hacker News

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

dlnews.com

271–280 of 391 posts

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

#271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generally I agree but this is crypto. Crypto is 100% zero-sum or negative-sum. The whole space is predicated on trying to take money from other participants rather than actually creating value. Creating at best the illusion of value is the goal. This guy nailed it. It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.

This guy was a part of creating that negative sum game in the first place. He shouldn’t be celebrated.

The only people who should be upset are the those who provided the cash that is going into this person's pockets. Otherwise, I don't have a care in the world about this departure compensation. It impacts me in no way.

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

#272

For a sense of scale; a somewhat representative figure for a lifetime median income of a worker in the US is ~2.5m [1][2] this guy is earning ~50 times that in a couple of years. To give these figures a bit of shape. This is like getting a smarties cake[3] and giving Surojit Chatterjee pretty much the entire cake for just a couple years work. Whereas the median worker gets, for working a lifetime of effort (~45 years…

It’s a fallacy that there is a fixed amount of money to go around. Less money for this Coinbase guy doesn’t mean more money for the median worker. If anything, probably the opposite.

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

#273
post #18
post #3

The title of the article is a bit misleading. It implies that he's leaving with a severance package -- that he was let go by the company -- but the $105M is from selling stock from his original employment package and it seems like he's leaving on his own volition.

It's not that misleading. This isn't an early employee who held onto his shares. He joined less than two years ago. He got an insanely high compensation package.

It turned out to be an insanely high compensation package because of the volatility of crypto

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

#274

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.

These comments don’t really address opportunity costs. It’s the same concept where why are we paying non profit CEOs so much but when you think about it those CEOs could have just worked for a much higher salary anywhere else . The cheap money era is gone now though.

That's a fallacy, those CEO's wouldn't be elsewhere making more, otherwise they would. That's just a trick they use to convince people of supporting with (in most cases tax free donations) their ridiculous life style. Another reason I prefer donating directly to people who need it, or volunteering. A person who is making 3M/year in an organization, is not the "sacrifice myself for the people" type, let's stop fouling ourselves.

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

#275
And how much is the average employee making? Honestly I'm down for making a law that says in order to pay execs more, they have to pay their workers more.

Even at a 50 to 1 ratio of worker to exec, they can still make more money but increase the wealth of the workers at the same time.

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

#276
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…

I am almost certain that GP was being sarcastic.

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

#277
this is what we call stealing a living.

to ya tech minions - slaving every day because some higher up said jira tickets gotta be complete.

dude made more money in two years than you would have made working 10 years at coinbase as an IC.

--also edit

Stock options are a bad way to pay people. Perverse incentives - the holder of stock options doesn't take risk in the way a normal way a stockholder does. a stock option holder isn't there for the long term.

if I had a company - you won't get stock options. you will get decent pay. and loan to buy company stock at public prices

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

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto companies were starving for talent, eager to pull people in from the "Web 2.0" world with lavish salaries. He recognized their desperation and negotiated a gigantic executive comp package. Also accurately sized-up Brian Armstrong as a lightweight who will eagerly sign-on anyone who strokes his ego. His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-ti…

This is like the opposite of hustle. Don't you think you are supporting getting massive compensation for essentially being bad at your job? Do you think it's ok because it happens to a large corporation? I can understand feeling happy at the big corporation's misery but respect isn't what is owed to this dude. Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it'…

"hustle" in this case is meant in the informal, pejorative way (a swindle)

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

#279
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Would say in all seriousness while nodding at your comment that America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and Africans but of future waves of immigrants as well, etc, and of the idea of the supremacy of the owner class (within which there was some relative, legally enshrined equality). The history of America is literally one of enabling experimentation and innovation in exploitation, of the framing tha…

As a first-generation immigrant I completely disagree with your framing here and it makes me sad that you view the United States in such an incredibly dismal way. There are many problems here, to be sure, but the US is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world to live, and, like very few other countries, tries to improve on its past, generation after generation.

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

#280
post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how to respond. I don't think being conniving is better than being smart, just sharing an observation. Do you disagree with the premise?

Yup. Because the way I read it you are saying one thing has value because it's rarer than the other. Maybe I read it wrong?

>so that's what people value.

It's not what I value, it's an observation of what others value. I know people couch their own opinions in the views of others a lot, but nowhere did I express personal feelings.

It was just trying to dig one layer deeper to contextualize the situation OP was talking about (Americans valorizing confidence games).

Post reply on HN