291–300 of 391 posts
I'm always intrigued at people's carriers and where exactly the inflection point was. Looking at Surojit's career, it went something like this: BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy, Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ? MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year? Head of…
Since when IIT Kharagpur is Tier 2?
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not so much the board as Brian Armstrong himself. he seems to have a history of very dubious C-suite hires, including acquihiring Balaji's Earn.com for $100m and constantly talking up his impact when it turned out to be.. a shitty e-learning platform ( https://www.coinbase.com/learning-rewards ) (i know i sound negative about all this but if i'm mistaken about Earn please correct me)
Balaji pulled off a heck of a heist himself. Partner at A16Z, spin out some bizarre crypto oil-cooled mining company, pivot like 4-5 times, and then have Coinbase, the company with your VC partners on the board "acquire" your failed startup for 10 figures after it's already burned through over $100M of investor money. These dudes just begging the SEC to get involved in VC deals.
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eh. BTC is up 40% year to date. FTX may have been the bottom of this cycle.
YTD is like 25 days… what’s the TTM?
I'm always intrigued at people's carriers and where exactly the inflection point was. Looking at Surojit's career, it went something like this: BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy, Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ? MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year? Head of…
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…
Goal: Stop overpaying top staff or increase the pay of your lowest workers, including commonly outsourced positions such as janitorial staff.
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I'm pretty much convinced that the inflection point is "Director" at a FAANG or "VP" at a smaller company. Once you get to that point, it's pretty much impossible to fail downward. Worker bees rise up in level when they succeed (or the economy is good) and fall down in level when they fail (or the economy is bad). But, I've never heard of a Director or VP or anyone from the "executive class" getting a downgrade when…
I think this is mainly because such people are very career focused (and politically savvy to get to that point) and careful not to take a role that could even signal a step back. That and they typically will have enough financial security that they don't need to rush anything. "Lower level" folks are less likely to have both of these be true.
Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, became a document review clerk after serving his jail sentence. But five years later he became something called a "Principal" for an analytics company called KeenCorp.
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Yeah, I hate it when people exchange money for goods and services in a non-coercive, mutually agreed transaction. There oughta be a law!
These executive salaries ara usually shareholder's money (like the whole business), and the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it.
Any examples to cite? Because I can't think of an example of a single company where this is true.
Usually it's a small group of shareholders that hold more than 50% of the company, making it essentially theirs as they hold a winning number of votes. They run it in a way that benefits them, placing their people on the Board of Directors, setting their goals, which the C's just follow. Sure the C's get paid well, but that's negotiated with the Board (who represents the majority shareholders).
I'll concede that sometimes, when the majority shareholder is also in the C-suite, you see more blatant "take from the company and give to myself" behavior. But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.
Poorly run companies usually have a poor Board of Directors. This usually happens when the majority shareholders are short sighted and prioritize short term profit over long term growth.
I've seen situations where the company/board claws back money after a C leaves, because the C was negligent/dishonest in their doings.
In all of the above cases, the shareholders are the one's holding the cards. I can't think of a single case where the board conspired with the C's to fleece the shareholders. To do so would likely result in criminal charges.
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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.
Are people angry at coinbase (and generally crypto exchanges) because they believe that exchanges allow vast amounts of people to speculate on the price of crypto and treat it as an investment vehicle when it was supposed to be a currency? And therefore nobody working for coinbase is capable of creating value.
Or are people angry at crypto overall because it's a wasteful cesspool and so because this guy took a product role in the crypto industry he's not capable of creating any value whatsoever so fuck him and fuck everyone that paid him?
Or are people angry with this guy because he's a bad or underwhelming product leader and the salary does not reflect the value he did bring to coinbase (perhaps you hold coinbase shares)? And therefore you feel he was somehow dishonest about his value and conned coinbase for millions and this reflects poorly on the startup/tech/vc industry?
The biggest news in this article is that coinbase is still worth over $10bn. The crypto scam looks dead but it's still moving.
I would like it to stay afloat till the summer, then vacation, then finding a real job. Edit : it’s not fair, we do work. Like a real job, but it feels … ethereal
I'm always intrigued at people's carriers and where exactly the inflection point was. Looking at Surojit's career, it went something like this: BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy, Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ? MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year? Head of…
I'm pretty much convinced that the inflection point is "Director" at a FAANG or "VP" at a smaller company. Once you get to that point, it's pretty much impossible to fail downward. Worker bees rise up in level when they succeed (or the economy is good) and fall down in level when they fail (or the economy is bad). But, I've never heard of a Director or VP or anyone from the "executive class" getting a downgrade when…