Our founding engineering team is going to be capped at 3 or 4 max engineers, and to get 20% you need to take a pay cut. So far people have generally taken the higher cash offers. The token grants on those translate to 4-8%, which is still more than typical.
We pay very competitive on the cash side (over 200k for exceptional engineers), and have offer options that are 10x more competitive on company stake side than other companies (up to 20% for exceptional engineers, but with lower cash as a tradeoff).
1) It's not a security, so it's not a share of the company. In order to be compliant with US law, we can only offer a utlity token
2) Crypto is a 10x better underlying data structure and architecture for the financial system: https://ortutay.substack.com/p/the-computer-science-case-for...
Well, they don't have to be employees. It's not for everyone, if you don't want a crypto token compensation, Fetchfox is not the right company for you to work for.
I usually make a few different offers that have cash / token allocation tradeoffs. Higher token = lower cash, and lower cash makes you more like a founder.
Just to give a concrete example, for a recent very good candidate, the offer on the high token side was ~20% of the expect total allocation and 150k cash. There is also a higher cash option with lower token allocation.
For less exceptional candidates, the offers are a lower token allocation the equivalent cash.
> I've noticed that recruiters recently will use euphemisms for crypto/blockchain/etc
I've seen this also, and I think its lame.
This is why at Fetchfox I explicitly use the phrase "crypto token" in the article and in all offers offers to prospective hires. It's a crypto token, so we call it that.
There are a lot of negative associations with the term, but using euphemisms just confuses people and makes it seem like you're afraid or that you're trying to trick them. I say, call a spade a spade, and call Voldemort "Voldemort".
> Why does no one run a completely employee owned tech company?
I thought about setting up Fetchfox this way, and in some ways we are an employee run company. Everyone including me gets the same crypto token as our stake in the company's success. I get a higher stake as the founder/ceo, but some offers give the employee 0.5 for every 1 of my allocations, which I think is pretty fair.
Long term, it would be nice if I had <50% stake in the project, and it self-managed somehow, similar to crypto projects like Ethereum.
That said, the phrase "employee owned" has some bad connotations. It has an implication that you are not trying very hard to grow, or that you are somehow less committed to company, or that you are some sort of co-op. For these reasons I don't like use that phrase.
I have a few pragmatic reasons why I want to use a crypto token, instead of traditional instruments.
The first one is liquidity timing. With a crypto token, you can have 24/7 trading and liquidity from basically day 1. There is no need for second markets with high fees and complicated process. Just a 10 second Uniswap contract.
Second, you don't need to "manage a cap table". The token trades and moves freely on the blockchain, permissionlessly for anyone who wants to use it.
The best example is how money transfers work in the current banking system. A money transfer is the canonical example of why you need transactions in a database: you want to deduct money from person A only of you successfuly transfer money to person B. But guess what: this is never executed as an actual atomic transaction, because A and B are usually at separate banks, in separate DB's.
Compare this to the blockchain: every single transfer is an atomic, universally auditable transaction. If you ignore all the noise and scams in crypto, this just makes 10x more sense to me as an engineer.
FetchFox as a company has two goals:
(1) Make the best possible AI scraper
(2) Prove that crypto tokens are viable and better alternative to traditional company structures
It's lame that so much crypto stuff is caught up in scams that obscure the underlying value.
Hey guys, CEO of FetchFox here. Happy to answer any questions about the crypto token. I'm also making the draft doc public, please be aware the details are still being worked out, but we will publish the full plans on our site within weeks.
> I am a US citizen, and sometimes I am really ashamed of my country
Is there any country in history with comparable economic and military power to the US that has a "cleaner" record in terms of "bad stuff"? I'm specifying comparable power to specifically exclude tiny nations that never had the capacity to do "bad stuff."
Putin launched a war against Ukraine in order to conquer it the traditional sense, ie to replace the existing government with his own government. The long term goal is for Russia to control this country's government.
The wars started by the US typically have the goal of establishing a democratic government. Japan is an example of a successful outcome. Iraq has a functioning democracy now. This policy is often criticized as "nation building." The long term goal is not for the US government to control these countries.
Really? I can’t think of a more empowered group today than software engineers. You can work at a large company and get predictable compensation. Alternately, you can work at a startup with the promise of a multi million dollar IPO. I’m each case, you can leverage multiple offers to negotiate higher compensation in equity or salary.
If neither of those appeals to you, you can start your own company. There are ideas that generate predictable income comparable to a day job, or you can go for your own start up home run.
If you think the Lyft founders are undeserving, then go out and start your own Lyft!
Let me propose another analysis which shows this is perfectly fair.
The founders created a company which delivers value by connecting over 1 million rides a day. Those riders benefit from Lyft. Additionally, riders on Uber benefit from lower prices due to competition. The IPO profits to the founders and investors are their reward for delivering this value.
If you assume each ride has $1 of consumer surplus, then they are delivering over $350M a year of consumer surplus a year.
As for the employees, first of all they all received base salary and benefits. They may not receive millions in the IPO, depending on when they joined, but that is the risk of working at a pre-IPO company. They all had the option to work at Google for a more predictable income.
It also depends a lot on the person, I have a pretty high bar for "exceptional": https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-thing...