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Comment by engi_nerd | Hacker News Reader

I'd love to know how much he pays his employees.

Doing something you believe in is really fantastic but it's higher on the hierarchy of needs than "put food on my table" and "keep my spouse from resenting me for never being around". If you're working 80 hours a week, then you should be compensated for that. Financially.

A few months ago, a USAF Colonel came and gave an address to the employees at my job site. "I know you all do this for patriotism and love of your country," he said. Sure, those are reasons...#9 or #10 on my list, maybe, for dealing with the insanity of flight test. #1, as the great Randy Moss would have said, is "Straight cash, homie."

I wonder how highly Mr. Sandhu's employees would rate the mission to "truly reinvent banking" on their list of reasons for coming to work?

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It's idiotic how companies always want people who are "insanely passionatiate" about their mission. It makes (slightly) more sense when you have 1-2 employees, but good luck finding 20+ people who have the skills you need AND are insanely passionate about empowering X to do Y through [buzzwords].

Actually it's not idiotic, it's dishonest. The reason they do it is so they can later frame everything in moral terms around the mission. Only working 60 hours? Not happy making 50% of market with .35% equity? You must not really believe in the mission!

"Only working 60 hours? Not happy making 50% of market with .35% equity? You must not really believe in the mission!"

Exactly. Now, there might be more money to make the goal happen and better if only the founders and VC's were similarly passionate rather than profit-motivated. ;)

That's the hippocracy of it. You can't have the "money is so unimportant to us, we're changing the world!" attitude while simultaneously screwing over your employees and taking the vast majority of the rewards

> I'd love to know how much he pays his employees.

I guess the answer is "not too much", from the article:

> We work long hours, we are not paid much, and even after raising over $10-million within our first year of operations, we still have a mountain to climb in our efforts to expand this company.

> Team members having a piece of the pie [equity] is the surest way to align everyone’s interests around the long-term objectives and vision of the business.

The problem with equity is that if the startup fail it's worthless, and there are many horror stories were the business use some technical trick "steal" the employees equity.

This. Be very careful here. Unless you know how the company's shares are structured AND have a say in all the different discussions about future splits and multi-class offerings don't put your head in the sand.

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