In these type of situations, all employees receive cash bonuses and "parachute payment" (total comp). I'm willing to bet the executives' compensation packages from Amazon are roughly 1 order of magnitude more than the average employee received. Foundational employees are likely sitting near 11-20 on the list getting remarkably fair packages that don't look too different form 1-10. If you stacked up all the employees total comp, it would most likely follow a normal distribution and probably aligns pretty closely to employee tenure and level.
I believe the article presents a false dichotomy: execs did well while early employees got shit. In reality, employees who were with the company at the time of the sale all fared similarly and comp looks essentially like it would if you dropped them all into similar roles at <big tech shop> independently.
The people that lost out were investors.
The dichotomy is actually: people who invested money vs people who didn't. If you bought into eero, in this case, you lost money across the board. The only factor affecting investors was the liquidation preference between preferred and common stock, and the first-in-last-out payout priority for preferred stock (both of which are absolutely standard). Buying stock options has always been a lottery ticket. I don't think anything insidious happened here... not all companies are unicorns.
I believe the article presents a false dichotomy: execs did well while early employees got shit. In reality, employees who were with the company at the time of the sale all fared similarly and comp looks essentially like it would if you dropped them all into similar roles at <big tech shop> independently.
The people that lost out were investors.
The dichotomy is actually: people who invested money vs people who didn't. If you bought into eero, in this case, you lost money across the board. The only factor affecting investors was the liquidation preference between preferred and common stock, and the first-in-last-out payout priority for preferred stock (both of which are absolutely standard). Buying stock options has always been a lottery ticket. I don't think anything insidious happened here... not all companies are unicorns.