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Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

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Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#101

Post by mminer237 »

lxgr wrote: post #95

> [...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us: I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well. (That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any…

OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case?

I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love to funnel everything to his pocketbook if he could in charge and trusting him to respect the law.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#102

Post by [deleted] »

wesselbindt wrote: post #62
stavros wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hm, I've seen this line of argumentation a lot, and I'd like to name it as a fallacy. It's basically "perfect is the enemy of the good", where one good action is dismissed because it's still not perfect. The product will get less bad for me when chasing revenue from me than how bad it will get for me when it's chasing revenue from someone who isn't me.

I see it a lot too, and it's called the Nirvana fallacy [1]. We shouldn't do anything about tax evasion because people will evade taxes anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total amount of tax evasion). We shouldn't ban drunk driving because people will drive drunk anyway (ignoring that you reduce the total number of drunk drivers). We shouldn't trust non-profits, because they seek revenue anyway (ignoring that it's…

[deleted]

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#103

Post by sponaugle »

ghaff wrote: post #64
motbus3 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would love to see it too. Also relations with for profit companies as well. But how much a CEO of a company like this should make? It seems quite lot of work and one needs to make a living. But how much would be fair in your opinion? I honestly have no idea

In the US, the CEO/executive director of a mid-size non-public company would probably expect a few hundred $K/year. Which isn't starvation wages, especially by European standards, but is something a lot of individual contributors in Silicon Valley would consider a relative pittance. And toss in no equity.

That is a good estimate.

You can see US non profit compensation online - https://datarepublican.com/nonprofit/assets/

Many of the presidents/vps make in that exact range (~$200 - $300k), although there are other like:

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/363...

Feeding America, which pays their CEO a tad under $1m.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#104

Post by moooo99 »

lxgr wrote: post #94
andy12_ wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because ad revenue can be used for the non-profit? Ecosia's whole thing is that when you use it, you indirectly help plant trees - "the search engine that plants trees".

But GP raises a good point: Are these two things that benefit from any kind of synergy in terms of skills required by the employees working there, target audience etc.? If not, it generally seems like a better idea to keep the two concerns separate in two different non-profit organizations. (I don't think it would be a problem for one non-profit to donate funds to another, especially if doing so was explicitly stated…

Ecosia themselves does not really plant trees. Instead they pay out money to different projects all around the world.

They are very transparent about it. They list the amounts paid, the partners, the tree species, etc.

They are also fairly efficient from what you can tell by their reports.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#105

Post by Galanwe »

fadesibert wrote: post #53
dwedge wrote: post #8

I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder... There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK. So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?). T…

Not sure how fiscality works in Germany, but if similar as France, then that would be 64k _super_ gross per employee per year. So you would remove ~25% of that to get employee gross. Meaning, more like 50k gross per year.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#106

Post by notTooFarGone »

reify wrote: post #9

I have and still use Ecosia Daily. Its a search engine, the same as all the other search engines. Ecosia delivers a combination of search results from Yahoo!, Google, Bing and Wikipedia. Advertisements are delivered by Yahoo! and Microsoft Advertising as part of a revenue sharing agreement with the company. Ad revenue is then used to plant trees you cant complain about that

apparently you can - see this thread.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#107

Post by rendx »

fadesibert wrote: post #53
dwedge wrote: post #8

I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…

I'm not sure how much that's creating outsized income for the founder... There are between 98 (2022 annual report number) and 120 (ZoomInfo) and 133 (LinkedIn number). German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK. So that's 637k EUR / 120 employees (although the payroll number jumps around between 450 and ~640 - weird, but who knows, # of employees shifting around or some paid quarterly or on commission?). T…

> German filings are notoriously opaque vs Europe or UK.

German company filings (for-profit and non-profit) are public at the registry of commerce (Handelsregister) but not easy to parse.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#108

Post by fsckboy »

dwedge wrote: post #8

I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…

>headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit"

or more to the point, profits are not "bad", they are a measure of "good". profits mean you are providing something of value that people want, that without you is otherwise scarce. your profits attract competition/substitution, driving the price down and the value up to consumers.

there are many sources of distortion to markets and eliminating them increases the good that markets do, but profits are not bad, just a measure of what is happening elsewhere in the market or in adjacent markets.

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#109

Post by lxgr »

mminer237 wrote: post #101
lxgr wrote: post #95

> [...] my two promises by turning Ecosia into a so-called “steward-owned company”. This model imposes two legally binding and irreversible restrictions on us: I really hope that we'll get a legal precedent for this actually being possible and durable in at least some countries, because that was the promise of OpenAI at some point as well. (That's not to say I have reason to suspect anything bad of the current or any…

OpenAI is legally bound to its non-profit goals, but the problem is that any law requires enforcement. If OpenAI acts against that public interest, is the Delaware attorney general really going to know and be able to prosecute the case? I think what's arguably more important than theoretical legal rights is actually having stewards that care about the public benefit rather than leaving someone who would really love t…

Definitely; by "hard legal guarantee" I mean the entire thing, i.e. both a law and it being enforced/upheld. (Conversely, it doesn't even need to necessarily be a law, but I'm afraid a strong social norm is even further out of reach at the moment.)

Re: Trees not profits: we're giving up our right to ever sell Ecosia (2018)

#110

Post by maltelandwehr »

lxgr wrote: post #96
dwedge wrote: post #8

I'm sure Ecosia are a good company, but headlines like this always make me a little suspicious. Non profits make a lot of money for their founders without it ever being "profit". Ecosia are reporting just over 600K euros a month in wages, I'd love to see the split and what % of that goes to the CEO. You don't need to sell a business if you have plenty of income from it every month - especially if now that can't be ta…

That's certainly a fair point, but currently even the (non-)possibility of shareholder ownership and for-profit takeovers seems to be on shaky ground with what OpenAI is trying. I think we should definitely ask for both (i.e. no executives profiting from excessive salaries and no future possibility of any dividends in any form to any owners), but I'd take at least one instead of neither any day.

Both of these conditions are true for Ecosia. They have bylaws that prevent excessive salaries.

In 2020, no one there made more than 100k as far as I know.

Source: I interviewed at Ecosia for an interim CPO role.

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